Asking a few people I know about giveaways on websites and they instantly say that it is very common nowadays. Back in early 2008, free giveaways are very rare and you can only find competition that you must win in order to enter the raffle. If you don’t believe me, try searching in Google for “giveaways” from 2000 to 2008 at the custom range time and you will hardly find any giveaways. The first time I did a giveaway on early 2008 was because I was walking around in a computer mall and saw a lot of boxed Kaspersky and Bitdefender software being sold. So I thought why don’t I buy one each and give it away to my readers?
My first giveaway was held on March 2008 which attracted over 500 participants for Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0 giveaway and the second one attracted less than 200 which is for BitDefender Antivirus 2008. The method to pick the winner is by extracting the names from the comments and run them under a list randomizer at random.org. The only requirement to participate in the giveaway is to subscribe the blog’s daily newsletter. Simple and fair.
Giveaways that are held on a lot of websites today I think are pretty absurd. It doesn’t seem to be the joy of giving, but rather than asking their readers to do things for them. For example, you must tweet, share, like, digg, stumble, subscribe, do everything that benefits the website and THEN you gain a very tiny chance to win when there is only 1 prize up for grasp. Another question to think about is whether the prize is really there, if the winners are even real, the selection of winners are not rigged, or… whole giveaway is a scam? Other than that, there are cheaters that tries to increase their chance in winning by using multiple different identities.
I have this dream where I’ve always wanted to do an improved daily premium software giveaway based on an automated system and I am happy to say that it has been implemented in our forums.
Currently, all you need to do is to register a one time free account in our forum, agree with the giveaway rules, and click the “Enter Me!” button at the giveaway page. The system will automatically and randomly pick winner(s) upon reaching the draw date and time (3PM Malaysian GMT+8 time or 12AM PST). The current active giveaway (Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012) schedule is a bit too long because I made a mistake on the date and time. A giveaway cycle is only for 24 hours and a new giveaway will automatically be posted when one has just ended. So it means that there will be a never-ending giveaway on our forum!
Another annoying problem on giveaways are sending of the licenses to the winners via email. There are countless times when they don’t receive my email because of their super sensitive spam filters and they blame me for not sending it. So I always make sure that I resend again using another email address if I don’t hear from them after 48 hours. This giveaway system is way better because the licenses are sent using private message (PM) and the winners are sure to get it once they log in to the forum.
Many improvements on this giveaway system are in schedule and will be implemented in the coming weeks. More exciting prizes will be made available for giveaways. If you have any request, you can do so at the Request forum.
Link to current daily giveaways: http://www.raymond.cc/forum/draw-entry/