A Note About Offerwalls

As you browse many PTC sites, you'll see a handful of names appear again and again— Peanut Labs, RadiumOne, Matomy, and so forth. These are called "offerwalls" by PTC sites and any site that deals with them. But what exactly are they and how do they work?

Well, you know how Google Ads works. An advertiser has a product to sell and wants to drive traffic to their site. They pay an ad network to drive the traffic, and the ad network pays a host to rent ad space for their ad. The advertiser usually pays by the impression, where they pay for each time the ad is viewed, or by the click-through, where they pay every time a user clicks on the ad to visit their site.

Offerwalls work the same way, but with two key differences.

First, rather than pay by the impression or by the click-through, advertisers pay by the conversion, where they pay for each user who clicks the ad and buys the product, signs up for the mailing list, or does whatever other action the advertiser specifies as the purpose of the ad.

Second, offerwalls introduce an additional step to the payment process. As with Google Ads, the ad network pays the host to rent ad space (with the pay being per conversion), but then the host then pays the consumer a percentage of the revenue earned. While Google Ads typically piggy-back on existing traffic to a site, offerwall traffic is driven almost entirely by these payouts.

Because the offerwalls are the ad networks, they, like Google Ads, rent space from many hosts for the same ads.

Additionally, because the fees they pay to their hosts are per conversion, low-traffic and high-traffic hosts receive the same fee for any one conversion. You will likely see the same ad appear on the same offerwall on many different PTC sites. Each and every one of those sites is being paid the same amount by the offerwall if you complete the offer; if one PTC site seems to be offering a higher payout for the offer, that's because that PTC site has elected to pay out a larger percentage to its users.

I haven't done exhaustive research on the matter, but in my general experience, I believe InstaGC offers the highest payout to users and keeps the smallest percentage for itself. Here's hoping they'll be able to continue offering free gift cards for many years to come!

Advertising disclaimer: I was paid 25 Points (25¢) by InstaGC for this post. This payment was made exclusively for the link in the previous paragraph and did not influence its contents.