ICS: New & Improved?

I've written positively about Instant Cash Sweepstakes before (I still wish they would change their name though. -_-) You answer a few user-created (and some sponsored) 3-question surveys and you win "tickets", "coins", and/or a few cents in actual cash. You can play every 3 hours, and once a day they hold a $50 prize drawing which you are automatically entered in with all the tickets you've won that day. You can cash out at just $2, and they send your money with Paypal. Very cool, no?

Since then, they've added a new feature to the site! Previously, the purpose of "coins'' was that you could save them up as long as you wanted and exchange them for more tickets in the daily $50 drawing. Now they've added a $2 drawing every 4 hours, and you use your coins to place entries in that drawing. You do this manually, and you can enter some or all of your coins (which you can still save up for as long as you want!)

I think this is a huge improvement to the site; you can have a much higher chance of winning the $2 drawing because it must be entered manually, so you can wait until very few people have entered, then dump all your coins. There's even a meter that tells you if a lot of coins have been entered (so if you wait until the meter is close to green, you will have a higher chance of winning!)

I haven't won any of the drawings yet, but I was able to cash out $10 just from the survey prizes, and I am still earning. You can even write your own surveys and other users will answer them!

MyPoints: a slightly lamer rewards site

While it's not as good as Swagbucks (which I have now gotten $185 worth of amazon.com gift cards from :D), MyPoints is another potential way to earn rewards. I've gotten $50 worth of gift cards from them (2x$25) in the past 9 months, so I'd say that's at least worth checking out.

It works like this: they send you a few sponsored emails a day. You get 5 points for clicking on them. That's all you have to do. You usually get more points (depending on the offer, sometimes 10-25, sometimes thousands) if you "take advantage of the offer" (ie buy something, but sometimes it's a free thing like sign up for a website or take a survey.)

That's about it. There are more ways to earn (if you install their toolbar you can get 75 points/month for doing at least 30 searches), but that's the meat of it. Their offer wall is lacking, and the only other way to earn points is by shopping. If you happen to already do a lot of online shopping, you are likely to rack up points much faster, but of course that somewhat defeats the purpose of "free" (still better than no rewards though!)

Other good points:

• Sometimes the ad emails they send actually have really good offers in them. I've mentioned before that I love drugstore.com. That site already has a lot of good deals, but thanks to MyPoints I've gotten additional deals *plus* extra rewards on MyPoints for buying stuff I would have paid more for at any local shop.
  
• You can actually get points for shopping on eBay! You can access eBay search and even bookmark items directly on MyPoints. Then, if you win an item that you clicked through, you get points from the purchase. Just make sure not to clear your cookies between the time you clicked and the end of the auction (if you do, just go back and click again.)
  

Kinda lame points:

• They actually insist on mailing you your gift card claim code. No clue why. The good news is, the letter shows up pretty quickly (less than a week in my experience.)
  
• There used to be a "Spin and Win" feature on the site which gave you the daily opportunity to get free points. It seems to be gone now.
  
• There doesn't seem to be a referral link or banners to use; you have to email people to get referrals, which I don't really like doing (makes me think all my friends and family will just start ignoring my emails because they may see stuff like that as spam. I much prefer to direct people to my blog!)
  

Bottom line: It's pretty worth it, but especially if you shop online frequently. They have a lot of available retailers, and seem to be pretty good at tracking cookies. (I have had to email Swagbucks customer support several times to get them to cough up my Shop & Earn points!)