Consumer

• Mar 22, 2006 11:00 pm US/Eastern
• Digg | Facebook | E-mail

  Close WindowE-mail This Page

  3 On Your Side: Blingo

  Required fields are marked with an asterisk(*)

  ---

  • Recipient E-mail:* 
  • • Your Name:* 
    • Your E-mail:* 
  • Add a Message:
  •   Send me a copy of this e-mail.

  • Type the characters in this picture:* Click here to refresh with new letters

  ---

  The information you provide will be used only to send the requested e-mail and will not be used to send any other e-mail communications. Read more in our Privacy Policy

  Send E-mail

  | Print

3 On Your Side: Blingo

PHILADELPHIA (CBS 3) ― Every day, you probably search the Internet. What if every time you did that, you had a shot at a prize? That's exactly what a new company is doing. 3 On Your Side's Jim Donovan has the story.

Caroline Barth got her iPod Shuffle for free.

"I told my friends about it. They didn't believe me," Barth said. "Then when I won something, I told them, 'Really, you'll win!'"

Laura Morris won movie tickets. How many times did she use it until you won?

"Probably like the second or third day," said Morris. "It was that quick."

How did they both do it? By searching the internet on a new site called Blingo. Blingo uses the same search engine Google does. But it also offers random prizes. Search at the right time, and you win everything from movie tickets to portable Playstations.

How can Blingo do this?

"We make money by showing sponsored results next to the search results you get. And when people click on the sponsored results, we make money," said Frank Anderson, CEO of Blingo.

That money goes back into prizes won by people like Laura Morris and her friends.

"He had won movie passes, I'd won movie passes, and my co-worker won a year of Netflix," said Morris.

"We hope to be profitable later this year, because we keep increasing our prizes as we grow our user base," said Anderson.

Want to increase your odds of winning? Sign up for Blingo Friends. Then invite your friends to join, too. If one of you wins, you all win the same prize.

As more people sign up, Blingo's founder promises more prizes: "The odds of winning have remained stable as we've grown, and it will continue to do so," said Anderson.

Morris summed it up: "You have to search things every day anyway. So why not win something?"

You can only win on your first ten searches a day, so don't bother searching over and over. The winners we talked to said, they won just by using Blingo in their everyday lives, not by trying hard.

(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)