Make Money on Moola.com

I’ve have the blessing and misfortune of being extremely curious. I’m always trying something new or tearing something apart see how it works - it’s just my nature. One of my favorite things to experiment with is the act of making money. As you may already know, I’ve done a wide variety of things to obtain it. A while back, I bumped into www.Moola.com, a site that allows you to compete and win money by beating opponents and make money by subjecting yourself to advertising. It’s a blend of addictive time wasting games and an opportunity to make cash. Naturally it piqued me interest.

As I have found out, you can pull $10 checks from them every month,

but it isn’t as sexy as people make it out to be. You’ll spend a lot of time for the money you do win. You’ll be better off just getting a job, or doing one of the better online money makers. What makes Moola so alluring is it’s gambling nature - don’t get sucked in. The raw truth is that most players won’t make any money because they don’t have the luck, discipline, time, or knowledge to do so.

Normally I wouldn’t bother telling you about such a mild “opportunity”, but after I looked into around, I noticed the lack of a decent strategy guide on how to succeed with the site … ANYWHERE. I saw hundreds of sites offering bits and pieces of seemingly helpful advice; “secrets”, “hacks” and “tips” abound - but almost all turned out to be a huge disappointment.

I suppose that there are a lot of people looking around for something like this, and finally there will be. Since I already spent the time playing around with it, you won’t have to waste time on it to just find out that it may not be what you’re looking for. If you’re not already familiar with Moola, let me clear the air and bring you up to speed.

Remember, its just is a fun thing to mess around on, with an added bonus of making a tiny bit of money altho there are some players making thousands. If you’re going to play, you might as well play as best you can. With enough time, yes, you will get your ten bucks.

The Basics

In a nutshell the process goes like this. Someone gives you a referral like the one below

Moola Referral Link

Join Moola Now

You can make money in three basic ways. Playing games to double your wagered money (*gamble*), complete advertising offers, or win it on a “spin and win” wheel.

Note Only available to residents of USA and Canada

When competing for money, you begin with a gift penny, as well as whenever you go bankrupt. Then you wager it on a game against an opponent. You watch an ad, waiting for the game, then hopefully you beat the other player and take the winnings. You can keep betting, trying to double your money.

You also can complete the ad offers, just like you would through www.cashcrate.com or www.treasuretrooper.com. What this means is that they have a list of offers, and they tell you an amount of money you get from completing them. Many of them require that you sign up on some site and take some survey, giving you $1.25. Others ask you to try some free trial, or even get cash back on purchasing certain items.

Spinning the cash wheel is like Wheel of Fortune, you spin it and you get anywhere from $0.02 - $9000. Even though amounts less than a dollar are most common, they do pay out larger sums with the wheel. A guy won $9000 in December. Anyway, you get one free spin a day, and you can randomly earn more spins on the wheel by using their search engine. Anecdotally, it seems like the embedded search tool bar pays out higher amounts than the one from the site interface.

I want to assure you, that if they owe it to you, they will pay you the money.

The Catch

The “fill out a survey” cash offers, or “bonus boosters” as they’re called on the site, aren’t as good as www.cashcrate.com’s. They are pretty decent, but they don’t have the number or quality of them. You never have to do a bonus booster if you don’t want to .

The real catch is that learning to make money with the games is pretty tough if you don’t have some guidance. It’s a lot harder to make the $10 minimum cash out then people would have you believe. Unless have the right “meta-plan” you’ll end up wasting your time with little to show for it.

Additionally, it’s improbable that you’ll ever reach the higher levels of cash. The top player last time I had checked only had 5k. Winning a significant number of sequential games highly unlikely. Eventually, you’ll lose. Your best bet is to bootstrap your way up as best you can, using all the knowledge and discipline you can muster. The good news is that when players go broke, Moola gives them another penny. That means that there is more and more money slowly working into the hands of other players, ready to be taken.

You can also make money off of people that you refer into the site - but they have to cash out or win some boosters for you to get the extra money. Don’t plan on having multi level marketing success with Moola unless something unusual happens.

The Meta Stratagy

The main ideas of my meta strategy involves understanding risk exposure, time managment, and maximizing your skill. If you manage your bankroll well, you’ll receive a Moola check soon enough.

Note: I have excluded the known opportunities regarding collusion - where you gather a bunch of players and try to “beat” the system, mainly because of their convoluted and unethical nature.

Risk Reduction

With the games, the risk is simple: you lose the money you wagered. Every time you play you are exposing yourself to risk. In my opinion, when you’ve built up a small corpus of money, it’s better to play one game for $1.00 than two games for $0.50. The less risk you have, the better. It’s funny, even with the small amounts of money wagered, greed can cloud your senses.

Another thing to possibly look into is how to manage your bankroll. A good blackjack card counter or book would be able to fill you in on the finer details. One such risk management/bankroll determined strategy goes like this:

You make a wager and if you lose, you at least double your bet. When you win, you make the lost money back and a bit extra. Even after a run of losses, you’ll eventually win back all your money with a little extra as long as you have the money to keep playing. The larger your bankroll, the greater the chance you’ll win and recoup your losses with a little extra. This is why I suggest you complete a few of the free offers first, so that you can immediately have a larger bankroll to start off with.

There are also some risks in filling out the forms and completing the bonus offers. When you sign up for a trial offer you may forget to cancel at the appropriate time and have to pay for the service. You also run the risk of having heaps of spam dumped upon you. The best risk reduction here, is to set up an exclusive email for the offers and to use a spreadsheet with the timed offers.

Time Management

Twice the games at half the wager takes twice the time. Since the games last 2-6 minutes apiece, the quicker you can boost up from wagering pennies the better, since your dollar per hour earning rate is higher.

To manage your time effectively, look at the offers and determine the rough amount of time needed to complete it, and when you’d get paid on it, as some don’t pay out until the 7 day trial is up. The offers change periodically, so just browse them, pick the one that offers the most cash for least effort and do it first. In this realm, time management is all about dollars per hour of effort.If doing this strictly for money, the less playing you do, the better. You only have four total spin and wins a day per 24 hours, I suggest that you play long enough to get at the first two - about 30-60 a day. If you have time to burn at work, go ahead and play more, since an online game of Paper Rock Scissors may be acceptable when there’s nothing to do.

To get my spins as fast as possible, I like to have another browser tab open with their search bar. While I’m waiting for the ad to finish before my game starts, I crank out some random searches to get my spins. This multitasking is possible even mid game, if you’re good enough.

Maximizing Your Skill

As mentioned earlier, there is a skill component to the games. I found a set of decent “Moola Solvers“, which may help you achieve above 50% wins. This is an awesome thing, because over time you’ll be able to amass a little chunk of change over time. However, the solvers have their limitations. Humans don’t always make logical decisions, so calculating against what a perfect player would do is partially flawed logic. Plus, since none of us have infinite time or money, we can never ride out the ups and downs to obtain fully predictable statistical probabilities. It’s true, given 100 moneys, 100 typewriters, and an infinite amount of time, you can arguably get the great works of Shakespeare, but you’ve got 30 minutes and six monkeys.

A few tips tip in particular for Hi-Low - The Moola Solver will help you understand the best move for you to make, counting the cards as it goes along, helping you to know whether to guess higher or lower, but you should also use the information from the other player to help determine when you lock in.

When you are head to head with an even number of lives, cards and the opponent mis-guesses, sending him back to the beginning, lock in your card. You’ll still be even on lives, but have a huge boost in placement. I’ll lock in like this as long as I have at least a two card lead after he gets set back. If even on lives, but ahead four cards, lock in as well. Remember that if you have one of the middle cards, 6,7,8,9,or 10, you’ll most likely want to lock and switch cards. You may get a better card to guess off from and you’ll also count down the deck further, making card counting more useful.

Speaking of card counting, if you don’t use one of the solver helps, it’s pretty easy to learn how to do a basic count in Hi-Low. When the game begins, start at zero. Whenever a card above eight is played, the deck count gets a -1. Whenever a card below eight is played, the deck gets a +1. If the deck is positive, you’re more likely to flip over a high card (above eight). If the deck is negative, it’ll more likely than not, be a low (below 8) card. The further in the game you go, the more likely the count will reflect the nature of the cards.

Although you’ll probably only complete a few bonus offers through Moola, it’s a good idea to the best at that type of thing anyway, as you’ll probably want to make better money with www.cashcrate.com or wherever. Speed is the key skill in filling out forms and completing the surveys for cash so I suggest getting an auto filler like Roboform. If you plan on making the “get paid to complete offers” method a part of your income, you may want to dabble in speed reading a bit so that you can skim text and pick up what you need to know.

Summary

I hope you’ve picked up some vaulable tips for Moola.com, as well as discovered whether or not you should spend some time playing around there. The Moola Solvers Solvers are great if you’re going to get into it, but no reason to get started on their own.You’ve seen a few options I’ve linked to that are much better.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. If you are going to play, play smart.

Interview with Arlen Ritchie, Moola's CEO

Interview with Arlen Ritchie, Moola's CEO
They call themselves a hot new advergaming company. Blogger opinions are already split on this, with some calling it a great idea and others arguing that it’s nothing but a fishy scheme. Last week, Moola’s CEO, Arlen Ritchie, gave me a presentation that stretched slightly over one hour. He gave the demo, I asked the questions. The result is below, God help us all.

Join Moola Here
The introduction
Moola works on a simple premise. Basically, you play your pennies against other players in one of the mini-games available and try to climb the advertournament’s ladder. The catch? Nothing comes out of your pocket. It’s all advertisers’ money.
Before each game, the system makes you watch an ad that, according to Ritchie, is highly targeted. Then, you have to answer a question regarding said ad. And then it’s off to bidding your penny(ies) against someone else.
This is also found
href="http://www.businessandgames.com/blog/2007/11/interview_with_arlen_ritchie_m.html">Here
Ritchie: “We first envisioned it as a mobile game. We turned our attention to the web. Advertisers are now shifting, spending more online.” So they moved to the web but didn’t abandon the mobile idea. “We have designed our games to be ported to mobile, so that players can play while they’re on their mobiles [..] and play against players on the web or mobile to mobile or web to web..” He stops for a moment, having just lost the match he was playing. “So now, say I was playing against you – you just doubled your money.”

The game
They’ve built a rewards game, he tells me. You watch ads, play games, collect currency and it’s all part of a bigger game which is climbing the Moola tower. Exclusively on advertisers’ money. “Players can never deposit. That’s where we draw the line. Moola’s always free so you have to collect money from advertisers.”

How would one get more money into their account then?




“ One of the ways you can do that is by using our search. […] Every time you do a search, the system randomly decides whether or not to give you a bonus.”

So they’ve got a custom search, complete with advertising and all. What does this entail then?

Ritchie: “We don’t motivate people to click on links. We only tell them to just use the search engine like they normally would.”
The other way players can actually collect is through an affiliate marketing program. “Let’s say I want to buy something at buy.com. So If you shop through Moola and buy something, we’re going to give you a portion of the commission that we receive.“

The toolbar
The demo continues with Ritchie showing me another feature that he seems rather enthusiastic about. He checks to make sure I’m aware of the press embargo before showing me the toolbar, something he calls “extremely unique”.
The Moola toolbar is a browser addon that indicates which merchants are connected to its cashback program. It indicates the amount you can receive in your Moola account for purchases (where available) and furthermore, whenever you’re on a website not affiliated with them, it provides you with links to Moola-connected websites offering the same service.

Social networking
Ritchie: “We wanted to build a social community around climbing the tower. We’re building profile pages, we’re gonna be tying it to Facebook so that you’ll be able to invite your friends from Facebook. Right now, we’ve been growing purely viral. It’s all done completely through word of mouth.”

The other side
So, say I have a brand – why do I want to get into Moola?
“The video ads are targeted individually to specific demographics users. We collect your age and postal code so that we can target those video commercials precisely.” Then, he argues, the question after the ad ensures that “each ad was watched and retained by your target. We tried to build it so it’s better than television, in terms of targeting and guaranteed impression.”

Me: On the other hand, people are already developing selective blindness to online advertising, such as banners. So what if, at a certain point, the users stop and say “Well, hang on, they’re making me all this advertising and for what? Nickels and dimes?” How do you plan on keeping them engaged?
Ritchie: "I think one of the differences between regular advertising, on sites where it’s not a part of the experience, is that I don’t welcome it because I’m there for the content, not for the ads. In Moola though, people realize that advertisers are paying their pennies so that they can play in the games for money.” And that changes the perception, Arlen Ritchie says. He promptly mentions that their users, unsolicited, “go on the forums and thank our advertisers for being very generous. They remember the ads because they’re answering trivia questions about the ads so it’s part of the experience.”

Me: Another thing I noticed; everybody seems to want an invite for some quick winnings, you created a good bit of buzz and I expect that after the 16th when you launch, it will grow even more. But, as a brand, why should I be bothered to advertise on a service whose users get overenthusiastic about cashing out 10$ checks? Another way of putting it is, who isn’t Moola for?
Ritchie: I’d say that the demographics of people who are attracted to Moola are very broad. There’s a lot to do, it’s much broader in appeal. The person who wrote Microsoft Word, he actually is retired now and he plays casino games. Well, he’s one of our gamers. He’s obviously extremely wealthy, very sophisticated but the concept of the competition and the novelty attracts a broad swad.

Me: So – let’s talk about the games? You have …three mini-games?
Ritchie: We’re creating something very similar to the Facebook patform. Anybody will be able to create a game and upload it and, when people play their game, they’ll get a percentage of all the money that goes through Moola and their game. Also, other gaming websites, like WorldWinner or King.com, will be able to Moola-enable their games. We look at it not as a destination only - you won’t have to come to Moola.com to play, you’ll be able to play wherever you encounter games that are Moola-enabled. And this will extend to different types of platforms. Right now, we’re talking to companies in the interactive television space that have games on set-top TV boxes and mobile games companies. They’ll also Moola-enable their games.

Me: In your vision, who is Moola competing with? I mean, I know there aren’t many similar ideas.
Ritchie: We’re not aware of anybody that’s doing something just like this and we see ourselves falling into a very unique opportunity gap. Right now there’s – on one side you’ve got casual games. They’re for free, they’re fun…

Me: And then, you’ve got online gambling sites, on the other hand.

Ritchie: Exactly, on the other side, you’ve got online gambling. And somewhere, more in the middle, there’s skill gaming. Skill games are legal but you still deposit your money. Moola is completely different. With Moola, it’s not your own money, it’s legal everywhere. And we can have every type of game that we want. We think it’s a unique market that’s not being serviced by the other games companies.

Gambling

Ritchie: We don’t use that word –gambling- we don’t market it as gambling but some people have looked at it and said ‘oh, it’s kind of like free gambling’. We just try to avoid the word because people, in the US mostly, are nervous about it.

Me: Okay, earlier you mentioned something that caught my interest. Namely, content creation. You said that people will be able to develop their own games, based on a toolkit or some such. How will that work? I mean, who will own the game in the end?
Ritchie: Who will own the game? The user. The developer.
Me: So, they can pull it off any time they want?
Ritchie: Right, like Facebook, you own your application.

Interesting figure


Ritchie: “Here’s an interesting figure too. You see this?” He points to a sidebar displaying ‘tournament stats’. “4.3 million? That’s the amount of money that people have exchanged in gameplay right now. And that’s what the game developers will make a percentage of and also, that’s just pennies. 4.365 million dollars worth of pennies exchanged in games. So that’s a lot of games.”

“Right”, I object “but that doesn’t make a total of 4 millions, does it? If the pennies moved around, isn’t it say the same 100.000 that went around to a lot of players?”

Ritchie: Right so, if the penny moves from me to you and then back to me, we count that as 2 cents. Every time it moves, we count it. It’s like a country’s GDP.

Me: So, it’s not exactly 4 millions. The reason I’m asking is because it’s a tad misleading, honestly. You see ‘cash won to date’ and you think it’s the amount of cash people went home with, you know?

“It’s displayed right here,” Ritchie shows me, clicking on the little question mark next to the figure “it says exactly how we count it. It always shows the cash won in games. So, when somebody wins a game, we add it to that figure.”


But what about this pyramid, I wonder. Gambling aside, people also mistrust pyramid schemes. So I ask – “you know – when someone says pyramid scheme, someone else says ‘What’s up with that? Oh, don’t bother.’ How do you reply to that?”

Ritchie: I think a referrals and invitations system like Gmail’s is very powerful for spreading a viral concept. So we looked at that system and at other systems, like network marketing, like Amway, and we’ve taken the best concepts from those and only used them where appropriate. So we don’t have any of the negative effects. In a pyramid scheme, you have to put your own money in. Moola is completely free. And players realize immediately that it’s a no-risk proposition.

Me: We’ve talked about money but, you know, as Moola grows, chances are that not everyone is going to go and cash out a big prize. And a lot of people will be just lingering down there. So, what will make them play? I want to play for fun. Let’s say I’m not interested in climbing [the tower] or I’m aware that I might not climb it. Why do I want to stick around? Say I want to play Moola for fun right? Say cash is a secondary goal.. Why will I have fun? Why will I stick around?

“Why do people post on somebody’s wall in Facebook?” he replies. “Why won’t they send them just a private message? It’s the idea that in a social community there are social factors that make people do stuff. Recognition is definitely a large one."
moolass6.PNG"Our forum users form a community and they have fun doing things. For example, they created Moola Big Brother. They create tournaments. And there’s a social aspect to it. When we introduced the leaderboard, something interesting happened which really illustrates the power of social dynamics. We had about a half dozen people email us, people who had already cashed out money. And they asked us to cancel that. The reason being, they wanted to be on the leaderboard. They wanted to be recognized by the community. So it’s part of the competitive and social aspect of gaming. And people look at it, I think, as something that’s fun in a social environment. “ The money, he says “is just a way of keeping score. It’s social gaming, really.”



Me: Again, on someone else’s money. [Sure sounds fun!]
Ritchie: Again, it doesn’t matter if you don’t make it, you never lost anything, you had fun. And then there are all the other social aspects that are driving a lot of them on.

Me: Any other directions that you’re looking to extend into? You’ve mentioned going outside Moola.com and on other gaming sites and you mentioned mobiles and whatnot. Anything else? Like virtual worlds for example?
Ritchie: More of the social aspect for example, right now we’re developing player profile pages where, in addition to earning money, you’ll be able to earn badges for achievements. So, if you accomplish something like – you play 500 games or you reach the 10 dollar level or maybe make 500 posts in the forum, you’ll earn badges that will be collectible and that you’ll be able to put on your profile page. Players will be able to see other people’s bounces, how they’re doing, how many games they played, those types of aspects. Also, for example, our members are building people avatars and they’re collecting money for doing it. They’re exchanging money. And, the way they exchange money right now, because we don’t have any opportunity for direct exchange, they go and play a private match and they lose on purpose so they can transfer money. So we’re building in more ways that people can treat Moola currency like regular currency so they can exchange it. There’s a whole economy aspect, kind of like the Second Life aspect, that we’ll eventually foster through some of the things we do.

Me: So far, how was the feedback from the companies you’ve been working with? I know it’s a bit early to ask this but if you can give me some names, some examples, some figures here.
Ritchie: We’ve been getting very good feedback – for example [shows me a list of brands]


Here are some of the brands that we’ve had campaigns on Moola for. Thus far, we don’t have any direct relations with the advertisers, because we work with their agencies, but the agencies continue to send more ads, for example, yesterday, we’ve got a new campaign for Southwest Airlines. The feedback is mostly from the users. When you read the Michael Arrington post on Techcrunch, he said “they succeeded in getting the yellowpages.com ad stuck in my head.” So that’s the type of feedback that I think the advertisers are going to get and will appreciate.

Me: Yeah but, do I want an ad stuck in my head?
Ritchie: Well, the advertiser wants it stuck in your head. [laughs].

Conclusion:
All in all, I liked most of the ideas that Moola is based on, even if I’m not a fan of all it's about. To each his own, I suppose. Arlen Ritchie is more enthusiastic about it than I am but hey, that’s normal, right? Now it’s a matter of how they sell themselves, I should say. And of course, of how the public reacts in the long run. (What’s the difference between the two?) Of course, there are a number of things that can go wrong, from any perspective – not coming off as ‘clean’ enough; giving the perception that they’re catering more to advertisers than they are to players; being dismissed for being something to the likeness of a ‘penny arcade’; not managing to fill its niche properly and being overtaken by an even ‘hotter’ company; flopping on the entire ‘social’ aspect [a question my girlfriend asked when I showed Moola to her – ‘if they’re all about the social aspect, why can’t I even chat with the person I’m playing against?’]; insert your own example here. On the other hand, if they do play it smart, they can create something really cool that will last, for good or bad. Not to forget, one big plus is providing the API that enables people to develop their own games. It’s a good move and likely to attract a good bit of extra attention around Moola as developers will be promoting their own games. Also, people who might not be interested in gambling for pennies will look into Moola because of the open platform.
Now, as far as I’m concerned, I already have a few million accounts I don’t use on various social networks, the pennies idea rings in the back of my head in a way I dislike but still, I’m pretty curious about how they’ll build themselves up and extend. And how will their advertising model work in the long run. Excuse the poor metaphor but maybe, while the players are climbing Moola’s tower, Moola’s building a tower of their own. That should be interesting to watch, as long as they don’t – you know – get stranded up there. I suggested that we do a follow-up to this interview in six months, so we’ll see how it progressed then.

This blog is made for educational purposes only any information may be from other autors,in the help to improve your game experience.

More Info About Moola.com

Moola is a new website, in private beta, that puts two visitors up against each other in a simple Flash game. The interesting thing about the site is that people are playing for real money.

Moola gives each new user $0.01 to start. You play against another player at your level, and the winner takes all of the money from the other person. So each time you win, you double your money. Win 30 times in a row and win $10.7 million. A user can “cash out” at any time and have a check delivered to them with their current balance. If you lose, you start over at $0.01.


The service is advertising supported. You have to watch a short video ad (every time I played it was for yellowpages.com) and then answer a question correctly about the ad. Once you’ve done that, you can play the next round.

I tried playing a few games and it seemed legitimate. I can’t tell if I was playing against a computer or not, though. Moola always found a rival to play against me within seconds, and the games are very simple and could be easily played by a computer. Given how easy it would be for Moola to beat successful players by automated means, I would assume that the risk of fraud is significant. The CEO of Moola addressed this question on the Moola blog.


What’s more interesting is Moola’s business model: paying users to watch ads. At the very least, they succeeded in getting yellowpages.com stuck in my head.

Moola also has a multi-tiered referall system. When you refer a user, you get a 4% bonus calculated based on any money they cash out for the following year. You get a 3% bonus from any friends they refer, and so on to the fourth level. Multi-level referrer programs are smart

It’s in private beta now. You can sign up for the beta


Join Moola Now

Moola Booster Blitz

As you may already know, the M is coming up very soon. The Blitz is a great way for you to get your games in and increase your chances of making more money. All you do is play lots of games and hope you get an booster wheel spin between each game. To help you out during the Booster Blitz, here are a few tips that I learned from the last event.

1. DO NOT start a game and not make your first move just to get to the Booster wheel. If you get caught, an admin will take all your booster winnings away from you. This happened during the last Booster Blitz.

2. If you are playing Gold Rush and after the first couple of turns you know that it will end up as a tie, I suggest that you let the time run out so that you can move on to the next game. The more time you save, the more games you can play.

3. DO NOT complain if you do not get a spin after your first few games. The spins are not guaranteed after each game. So some people may not get a spin at all during the event. Keep playing, you may just be lucky if you play enough games.

4. If you plan on visiting the forums, open a separate window to do so. Use one window to play the games, and you can use the other to browse the forums. Once again, this will allow you to maximize your time during the Booster Blitz.

5. If you are playing with a large balance, the booster blitz is a great time to find new opponents on higher levels. Make sure you have enough money in your balance to play those higher levels.

6. Don't forget to have fun. It's just a game. Don't get to frustrated. If you don't have luck today, there is always another Booster Blitz

7. If you are not doing well on a higher level, play a lower level and just hope for the booster wheel.

8. Most importantly Do Not forget about other priorities. Sure the Booster Blitz will allow you to PROBABLY make some additional cash, but this does not mean that you should ditch everything else in your life. There will be more Booster Blitz's in the future.

Best of luck to everyone. If you have any tips you would like to share, please add them in the comments (you don't need to register to comment)