Free iPods?!

Your kids may come to you starry-eyed about FreeiPods.com. Don't worry - according to Wired News, it's not a scam, but rather a "customer acquisition" program. As Wired puts it, advertisers have discovered "it's more effective to spend $50 million on gifts than to blow
the cash on TV ads." In this case, people get free iPod minis for choosing and participating in one of 10 different free trials such as 45 days of AOL or 2 weeks of genealogy research at Ancestry.com. The company that sends out the iPods is Gratis Internet, which gets paid for sending potential customers to the likes of AOL, eBay, or RealNetworks. Gratis told Wired News that since it launched FreeiPods.com in June, it has shipped 2,500 of the little MP3 players.