Gómez PEER

Gomez Peer, Never Heard of Him?
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Trying to get a little extra spending money for my upcoming holiday I did a little Google search to see if there were any decent online reward sites. I didn't find many that I didn't already know about. I did however come across Gomez Peer.

The idea is that you download a piece of software and leave it running in the background when you are online and it goes away testing the performance of web sites and reports back (doesn't that sound a bit like spyware). The way you earn money is that for every processing minute you will get some money deposited into a paypal account of your choice.

All well and good I thought, so I had a go.

The Software
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The software itself is about 21Mb in size, so it downloaded pretty quickly on my broadband connection. There are two download options, American and international, obviously I went for international. The install went through fine. When it had installed it prompted me to enter a user id and some details about my PC and net connection. It then went away and connected back to HQ to initialize.

It installs a system tray icon that you can click on and a kind of dashboard appears telling you your statistics. It lists time online, processing time and earnings split into day, month and lifetime. It also lists your ranking and account status and the important one, Potential Earning, still said $0.00 (it's in American currency).

I Waited...
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I left it running while I went out. I came back quiet a bit later and had a look, earnings still $0.00, however my ranking had gone up a bit (It started at around 65,000 and it goes down slowly). My time online was also being logged, so I thought I'd give it a bit to see if it speeded up.

I Waited Longer...
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After a day of running I had clocked up a measly $0.01, that's about half a pence sterling. So much for it speeding up. Surely that can't be right. I looked it up on some forums and it all started to become clear.

I Gave Up
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Now, here's the problem. Earnings are given based on processing time, not time online, Now, processing time was about 10 - 15 minutes a day. For each processing minute you get $0.0005. I was earning approximately $0.01 a day.

Even that is misleading however, there is another catch. My account status was Pending. It turns out that they do not pay out until your account is active. They say they check pending accounts every 7-10 working days. They pay out at the end of every month. When the end of the month came I received an email saying that my application to be a peer had been unsuccessful at this time, but may become active in the future. I checked and they had reset my potential earning back to zero (that's not cricket).

To earn any money at all, it seems that they are really looking for uses with a dial up connection. Not broadband. I find this a little strange as most people seem to be on a high speed connection, or are planning to.

If you are lucky enough to be activated then it is possible to have more than one PC on the same account. This may help you to get accepted. (I considered installing it at work but for some reason the letter P and numbers 4 and 5 kept coming into my head, can't think why). There is also a referral bonus of $1.00 when somebody uses your reference when they register. However, I decided that it really isn't worth the hassle.

Amusingly they have a maximum earning level of $45.00. If you look at their leader board then quite a lot have reached it. I came to the conclusion they're either made up, or they are people with access to a lot of computers.

So I said goodbye to Gomez, it now uninstalled (along with my DSL connection, it knackered my drivers when it uninstalled, the damn thing).

There was one good think that came out of it however, I realised that I spend far too long online.

My advice is, don't bother unless you've got access to lots of computers.

Thanks for reading.