It sounds too good to be true, but Cassandra Janda is happy to tell you it is not.
That’s because Janda won an iPod Nano while doing a Google search. She declined the iPod and received a $200 Visa debit card instead.
Janda, who holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, was searching the Web for new car insurance when she won the iPod.
And even though all of her Web searches are through Google, she uses a site called Blingo (www.blingo.com) to start her online research.
“Blingo is powered by Google,” Janda said. “You get Google results, but you can also win prizes.”
The brainchild of University of Illinois graduate Frank Anderson, Blingo randomly awards about 50 prizes per day, including movie tickets and PlayStation Portable video game devices, to users of its search engine.
“Blingo is basically the marriage of two of the most popular things on the Internet: search and sweepstakes,” said Anderson, the chief executive of the 2-year-old, 10-person firm.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?
“Nobody believed me that it’s totally legit until I won something,” Janda said with a laugh. “My friends thought it was some sort of scam.”
Anderson is working hard to convince people that it’s not.
“That’s one of our biggest challenges,” he said. “People don’t understand that we can actually make money without having to do evil things. If people use Blingo to search, they will inevitably click on some of those little Google text ads on the side of the page, and that’s how we make money.”
Blingo partnered with Google in March (Anderson’s college roommate works there and made the introduction), becoming an entry point to the Internet’s most popular search engine.
Here’s how Blingo works:
Go to Blingo.com and type in what you’re searching for. Google results are returned. Repeat as often as you like.
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Eventually, you may win something.
“We basically know how many prizes we’re going to give away in a given month,” Anderson said. “And our technology picks winners at random.”
More than 12,000 prizes have been awarded in the year that Blingo has been operational, with about 300 in the Chicago area.
There’s no signing up, no pop-up windows and no advertising besides Google text ads, which is how Blingo makes money.
“Google is going to do about $6 billion in revenue this year, and most of it comes from these little text ads when you do a search,” said Anderson. “Whenever you do a search on our site, there will be three sponsored links on top of the search results. Google gets paid when those links are clicked on, and we get a portion of that money.”
Indeed, Blingo, and all Google partners, get a surprisingly large portion of that money.
“Google shares about 80 percent of the revenue generated [by partners] on their site,” he said. “We get a fair percentage of the revenue, which allows us to give away the prizes and still make money.”
Users can accept cash in lieu of the prizes.
Janda already has a 40 gigabyte iPod, so she opted for the cash equivalent of her prize, about $200, in the form of a Blingo Visa debit card.
“About 80 percent of people choose the Blingo Visa,” said Anderson.
Another option: Winners of movie tickets can choose iTunes Music Store gift certificates instead.
“I got this winning screen. It said `Congratulations, you won an Apple iPod Nano,'” Janda said. “I was shocked.”
Winning prizes for searching the Web. It’s good. And it’s true.
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