Before Reading,
please note this isn't a "Get Rich Quick" tutorial, nor is it a tutorial on making a full income online. These are the things I did as a kid to make side change to be able to afford to pay for a lot of gaming luxuries without needing to spend the money I was saving from gifts.
Video Games
are what really inspired me, as a kid, to make money online so I can purchase in-game items such as skins.
The money I made online was mainly used to finance purchases of these types, and looking back at it kind of hurts for the following reasons:
- I no longer play the games that I've spent a lot of money on,
- My account with $1000+ has been PERMANENTLY BANNED (League of Legends), and
- I keep imagining me having saved this money and being able to use it today.
To look at a BIG list of most of the games I've ever played, CLICK HERE!
That aside, let's talk about 3 ways I made money online as a 13 year old kid (you can click on the titles of each to visit the site!):
1) Swagbucks
This was my bread-and-butter to make money back then because of how easy it was. Logging into it recently, I noticed some updates, but they kept their core options: surveys and offers.
I am sad to see that they removed one of my favorite ways to make money, which was a game called Swagasaurus Run, and people could wager their points (money) in a tournament and the winner gets the 1st place prize. (Gambling at 13?!?)
Aside from that, I regularly did surveys enough to fill my daily points goal, which when achieved, awarded you with bonus points! As I tell everyone trying to get into surveys, surveys intentionally ask screening questions to determine if you are qualified to do their survey (age,income,health conditions...), and ideally, you want to maintain an average income 35 year old setting, which in my experience has the highest rate of qualification! Oh survey 101 tip #1: when they ask if you or anyone in your household works in a list of domains, always, always say NO.
In addition to surveys and games, I also did offers such as: Sign up at x casino and make a $x deposit to get your reward. For these offers to be profitable, obviously you want the reward to be more than the deposit! I am not sure if they still offer these, but I remember making a 10$ deposit and getting 2000 Swagbucks (equivalent to 20$).
Here are examples of my withdrawals:
(I won't post all because I have pages and pages of them, not to brag)
2) Opinion Outpost
(Note on the link: above is linked to the .com site, for Canadians change it to .ca)
Well, you guessed it! As the name suggests, it is another survey website! You may be wondering, why the hell do I need to be part of different survey websites? Well on one site, typically, there are limited number of available surveys to complete, so once they're done, you swing on over to the next site!
Once again, the surveys are very easy and fast, but Opinion Outpost offers quarterly prize draws of $2,500, and to get tickets, you must complete surveys (1 drawing ticket per survey qualification/non-qualification). I must say, at first I was thrilled at the feeling of having 100s of tickets, feeling great about my chances at winning a nice sum of money, but was always unsuccessful. ☹️. On the bright side, at least it pushed me to make more money from the surveys themselves!
Here are some of my many checkouts:
3) YouTube
Yes, I was a YouTuber as well! And, I bet you'd never guess what kind of videos I uploaded: gaming videos. Look, I wasn't a huge deal. I had a little over 1000 subscribers, which felt great at the time (14 years old). I was also a YouTube partner, which is what allows people to put ads and make money from their videos. I hadn't made a huge amount of money from YouTube since you'd typically get paid per views, and I didn't have a whole lot, I ended with a little over 100k total views across all my videos.
Check it out:
Here are my first three payouts on PayPal:
I had since deleted all my videos and stopped making vids when the total video views drops to 0.
Thanks for reading ☺️