Monday 23 October 2017

The High Cost of Earning Money Online

I don't know what it's like where you live, but in South Africa using the internet can be an expensive business. My service provider charges me a monthly fee of approximately $30 for my ADSL line, but in order to use it I'm expected to pay an additional fee for a landline too. That's not a problem though because I'm one of those people who still regard a landline as an essential method of communication, but many people feel differently.

The good news is that my internet contract allows me uncapped data so I'm free to spend as much time as I'd like online. The bad news is that, by today's standards, my connection is horribly slow. Watching videos online can be a stop-start affair so I rarely watch any that are more than a few minutes in length.

That's my normal way of using the internet. Unfortunately for a few weeks during August and September things were anything but normal. During that time my landline and internet connection were damaged on three separate occasions, and I didn't have internet active on my phone, so I was left with no connection to the outside world for a total of seventeen days in one month.

In the end I was forced to go out and buy a dongle so that I could receive my email and keep in touch with my online friends. The data it used was much more expensive than what I'm accustomed to paying. Trying to earn money using sites like myLot, ForumCoin and Postloop was out of the question. The money I could have earned from my activities at those sites wouldn't come close to covering the cost of the data required to visit them. Yet they're all sites which I enjoy using, and now that things have returned to normal I plan to continue using them in my spare time.

However my realisation of how much it can cost to earn money online made me feel really foolish for ever having experimented with paid to click sites. I hate to think how much time it takes to click enough ads to earn just one dollar and how much data gets consumed in the process.

I firmly believe that those with the right skills can earn a decent income online, but working for pennies is a time consuming business and if you choose to do so, it's important to be aware of the hidden costs involved.

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