Sounds like a twisted way to get paid for customers...
Instead, they explained, Gratis Internet is paid a bounty for sending potential customers to sites like AOL, eBay or RealNetworks.
Which would mean sites like AOL, eBay or RealNetworks are paying $50 for leads to customers that may not spend any money anyways.
I don't know many business that will pay $50 each for deadbeat leads, it's cheaper to build your own free iPod program and give away 5 of them in a internet contest.
Those leads will allow the company to get around any spam and do-not-call list and harass the customers all they want.
Somehow the economics of the program don't quite work out.
Would you rather pay $5000 for 100 leads or pay the same amount into a run a give-a-away and collect 10,000 leads for the same amount of money.
Plus these deadbeats from your contest are worth money, because you can charge other companies money to use your phone room operation to sell their crap. You cannot sell the list (you need personal contact between customer and company), but you can sell crap for other people.
Plus with the millions of sign-ups -- it's now doubtful that people will collect iPods much longer. $50 per deadbeat isn't a wise move.
Now if you ramp the contest up a notch -- giving away 5,000 iPods to collect millions of leads that you can sell is a wise move if you are a scumbag company who wants to run a spam/telemarketing operation.
Extremely cheap way to get around all the federal rules, and highly doubtful the free iPods will really continue much longer.
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So as a legit operation it won't work, factor in a scumbag end-run around federal spam/telemarketing rules -- and it does.
