The Truth Behind Giveways: Real Generosity or Cheap Publicity

Giveaways and sweepstakes are very common on internet. And in past few years they have become too common. Atleast once in life it happens with everyone that they may become frenzied about luck or free-rewards and become lottery or giveaway maniacs searching for more and more giveaways in hope of winning. It happened with me, atleast. And I managed to win a couple of times. Not something big, though.

Some giveaways aim at rewarding rewarding people based on skills. Example : For solving a puzzle or Sudoku in shortest amount of time, slogan writing etc. And I like such giveaways as it spaeks of rewarding a talent and not trading for publicity.

And it does make a little bit of sense to frown at those which may seem too generous like "Subscribe to us and win something(something big)", just because it doesn't seem to be in accordance with give and take policy of the materialistic world. Yes, anyone can understand that such a giveaway is for driving in subscribers which may eventually benefit the sponsor but what if he simply doesn't stick to his word or if he simply displays a name.

And due to its simplicity and ease of use Rafflecopter has become the most used platform for hosting giveaways by websites and blogs. And these Rafflecopter giveaways belong to the latter kind

While most of the web apps that help in holding up these giveaways provide their own mechanism for choosing winners randomly and and displaying them but the organisers seldom stick to that. And the loophole here is the lack of strict restrictions by these web apps on the organisers such that the winner cannot be chosen as they like.

Here are some examples:

The place where winner update is mentioned is where the Rafflecopter widget used to be.

Abandoned widgets like this lie around all over one.

Everyone promises that the winner would be decided by a random selection but do they really do so?

If yes, then rafflecopter has its has built in support for that. Logging in to a rafflecopter account, there exists 4 pages out of which one is 'moderate/pick a winner' page and here, they have an integration with random.org to choose a winner randomly from the entries; to verify them and to display the winners on the widget itself.

And according to this post on Rafflecopter blog, if the organiser doesn't follow the above method of selection he is free to display the winner outside the widget and this is what we see everywhere. If a giveaway is really genuine, I don't find any reasons for doing this.

Ok, Let's agree that there exists some unexplainable reason for doing this. But then, why this?

Here is a comment from the winner announcement page of a giveaway which had an "add a comment to this post" clause. Some Rishi Raj was declared as a winner.

Here is another example:

Another comment from a winner announcement page of a giveaway which had an "add a comment to this post" clause.

Atleast a photo of the person with links to his facebook or twitter profiles can let everyone confirm the winner is genuine. But that is very rare.

Oops! Did it sound like this?

SORRY! This is not what it really meant.