Flash Render Quality changer. When you want to reduce the video strain on your computer.

I've mentioned before that there are various sites, like EarnHoney, Earnably, Perk, Branded Surveys and Swagbucks, which pay you to watch videos.

There can, however, be a problem with that.

And that's that some of the videos on such sites can use Flash, which means they may put a hefty strain on your computer, your browser and your RAM, slowing your machine down and causing it to heat up.

Fortunately, if you use Google Chrome, there's a way to help reduce that problem - and that's to add an extension called FRQc (Flash Render Quality changer) to it. Once that's on there, you can use it to choose the quality level of  any Flash-based videos that are playing in your browser and, therefore, reduce the level of strain they're putting on your machine.

Having had such videos bring my laptop grinding to a near-halt in the past, I know how useful such a feature can be. Therefore, you can find Flash Render Quality changer at the Google Chrome Web Store. This isn't an affiliate link and I won't make any money from you using it.

Curious Cat. The quick-paying survey app.

Curious Cat is a survey app I've just downloaded to my phone and given a quick try-out to.

It offers surveys from sources that'll be familiar to all regular survey takers, such as Samplicio and the somewhat unfortunately named Cint and is a quick, easy and no-nonsense way to do them.

As with all sites that offer such surveys, rewards are variable. Some are clearly generous and some aren't really worth bothering with. It all depends on how much time you're willing to spend earning a particular amount of money.

There's also the familiar problem of getting screened out of surveys, which clearly happens a lot.

Having said that, the ones I tried screened me out almost instantly, so at least not much time was wasted.

But easily the main selling point for Curious Cat is that you only need to earn £1 in order to cash-out, which is done via PayPal, and you receive your money almost instantly.

In the half hour since I downloaded it, I've earned 45 pence, so I've still got a way to go before a cash-out. From reviews I've seen online, it seems there are no problems with Curious Cat stumping up the money it owes you, so I'd see the app as being promising. I'll post more information as I have it.

Curious Cat is available for both IOS and Android. You can find out more and get the app by going to the official Curious Cat site, right here. This isn't a referral link, so I won't make any money if you use it.

Payment method: PayPal. Minimum payout: £1. Time for payouts to be processed: Instant. My rating: Too early to say yet but intriguing. DOWNLOAD CURIOUS CAT.

Prolific Assistant. Make sure you never miss out on a Prolific study again.

As I've mentioned before, by far my favourite, "survey," site is Prolific, which pays you to take part in academic research studies, mostly of less than half an hour in length. The studies are usually interesting and, generally, have a healthy pay rate.

There is, however, one problem with Prolific, and that's that it hardly ever emails you to let you know there are studies available. On top of that, studies are often snapped up within minutes of appearing, meaning you can miss out on them completely.

To get round this problem, you can always have the site's Studies page permanently open, with Super Auto Refresh set to reload the page every minute or so. However, that isn't necessarily the most convenient of things and, if everyone does it, it's in danger of slowing the site down to a halt.

Fortunately, there is a better way. And that's to use Prolific Assistant, an extension to your browser, which alerts you whenever a Prolific study's available. At the moment, Prolific is testing a new Beta version of its site, which isn't yet, it seems, compatible with Prolific Assistant. However, the extension still works fine with the old version of the site and I'd assume the extension will be updated to work with the new version of the site before too long.

If you do use Prolific Assistant, make sure to have it set to listen for changes to Prolific at intervals of more than 60 seconds, so that it doesn't put too much strain on the site's servers, which could cause problems with page loading.

Prolific Assistant is highly recommended and you can get it by going to the Google Chrome Web Store. Rest assured that's not a referral link and I won't make any money from you using it.

This, however, is a referral link. Use it to sign up to Prolific and both you and I could make money from it.

AppTrailers. Make money from ignoring videos.

AppTrailers is an app associated with Perk, a rewards site I've not mentioned before, and it's an app that pays you to watch videos.

Or, at least, it pays you to watch the ads that play between the videos.

The good news is you don't actually have to watch either the videos or the ads because it has no way of knowing whether you're watching or not.

Once you've downloaded AppTrailers to your phone, launched and registered it, you'll be given a choice of video channels to watch and then you can just start them playing. Of its various channels, I'd recommend Rapid Reviews, as its videos are short.

Around every half an hour or so, a message will appear, on-screen, asking if you're still paying attention. You click, "Yes," and the app continues playing.

One of the things you quickly notice is that, as the day progresses, you get paid less and less for each video you watch, until it stops paying at all. Therefore, it's best to check, from time to time, to make sure it's still crediting. If it's not, simply close it down for the day and then resume tomorrow.

You can also earn on AppTrailers by doing its Daily Quiz. The questions are of variable difficulty but are multiple choice. The quiz doesn't pay hugely but it adds a few more points to your daily total.

The amount of money you can make from AppTrailers can vary wildly. Some days, I make 50-70 pence from it. Other days, I'm lucky to make 10-20. It all depends on how many ads are available, and that depends on such factors as the day of the week, time of year and also where you happen to be.

Still, whatever the inconsistency, it's money for doing nothing and, so, I'd say it's well worth trying.

You can get AppTrailers for both Android and IOS by going to the AppTrailers homepage, via this this link. This isn't a referral link, which means I'll make no money from you using it.

Vivatic. It does a bit of everything.

In my nightmarish quest to investigate online money-making opportunities, I've just signed up with a site called Vivatic. It's far too early for me to pass judgement on it but I can at least described what I've experienced so far.

Vivatic seems to be in some ways comparable to the inevitable Swagbucks, in that it offers a variety of ways to make money.

Like Swagbucks, it offers the chance to earn from signing up for various offers. As I've said in the past, I never bother with such offers, as they hardly ever seem to credit and you're often giving unfamiliar companies too much information for comfort.

Vivatic also acts as a survey aggregator. Most of the surveys it offers are from the usual suspects, like Toluna, Survey Sampling International and Speak Up, with pay rates for their surveys looking to be fairly typical of aggregator sites.

Something that is unusual is that it also offers Populus surveys. I don't think I've ever seen Populus surveys offered by an aggregator, so that's certainly something new.

Having said that, as you can join Populus directly, it's hard to see why you'd got through an aggregator who'll, presumably, get a cut of your earnings and, therefore, I assume, pay you less than if you went direct to the original source.

Vivatic also offers surveys by someone called MVF who I've never heard of. Therefore, I've just attempted a two minute survey with them and duly earned 10 pence for it. I shall look further into MVF to find out what they're about and also whether this offer's repeatable.

You can also make money by doing, "Tasks." As far as I can see, these involve some sort of writing micro-task for an outfit called Figure Eight, who I've never heard of. You have to sign-up with them to complete their offers. I haven't done so yet. I'll look into them later and give my opinion when I'm more informed.

It would appear that, once you've completed a certain number of micro-tasks, you qualify for better writing jobs, with £3 being the maximum potential reward for completing such a job.

The features that Vivatic shares with other sites seem fairly standard and there aren't as many of them as with Swagbucks but its few distinctive features seem to hold at least some potential interest for the determined money-maker. Therefore, if you want to join Vivatic, you can do so by using this referral link, from which I could potentially make a modest sum.

Payment method: PayPal. Minimum payout: £20/$20. Time for payouts to be processed: 1-2 months! My earnings today: 10 pence. My rating: Too early to say. JOIN VIVATIC.

SurveyNetwork. The site that does what it says on the tin.

SurveyNetwork is another survey aggregator site, like Branded Surveys, Swagbucks and Qmee.

In my experience, it mostly offers surveys from Global Test Market, Toluna and Survey Sampling International. This means its pay rates tend to be in the mid-range, possibly slightly higher than the three aforementioned aggregators but not by very much.

When it comes to using it, I'd personally say it's a bit pointless trying to use the home page to access surveys. You can do it that way but there's not enough reliable information on there about which surveys are still available. It works better if you click on links for surveys that have been sent to you via emails.

Speaking of which, I note that other SurveyNetwork users have complained that it spams them with hundreds of emails a day. It's not a problem I've had but it's something to keep an eye out for and is a reminder that it's always wise to set up an email account which exists purely for dealing with survey site, so that it doesn't matter if it gets drowned in emails from either them or their partners.

I don't use SurveyNetwork much because it basically duplicates what other sites offer, and that lack of use means my earnings from it have been low. However, it seems clear to me that if I used it more, my earnings from it would be comparable to what I get from those other sites.

If you want to sign up to SurveyNetwork, you can do so by clicking on this referral link, for which I would receive a modest reward.

Payment method: PayPal. Minimum payout: £20. Time for payouts to be processed: They claim it's speedy but I've not yet claimed a payout from them, so I cannot vouch for that. My earnings in the last week: 60 pence. My rating: 6/10. JOIN SURVEYNETWORK.

Super Auto Refresh. The Chrome Extension for when you need to keep up to date.

One of the things I've discovered with a number of the sites I've tried to make money from is that, if you're not quick on the uptake, you can miss out on opportunities.

Content mills are a prime example of this, where job offers can be snapped up by others before you even knew they were ever there.

One way to get round this is to leave that site's job page open, in a separate window, with an auto-refresher extension added to your browser, while you're using your computer for other things,

There are plenty of such extensions and add-ons available but the one I'm currently using on Chrome is Super Auto Refresh. It only take a few moments for you to attach it to your browser and, once it's there, you can set it to auto-refresh any page of your choice at whatever interval you like between 2 seconds and 60 minutes.

For the more active sites, like Textbroker, I have Super Auto Refresh set to do its thing once every 2 minutes.

For sites where jobs hang around for a longer time, like Copify, I have it set to refresh every twenty minutes.

Super Auto Refresh can be found by clicking on this mighty link or you can simply go to the Google Chrome Web Store, where a whole host of auto-refresher extensions can be found.

iWriter. There's plenty of work on offer, but...

I think it's fairly obvious by now that my adventures in the realms of content milldom have been somewhat uneventful. I've made money with Textbroker but Copify, Zerys and Crowd Content have proven to be almost total wash-outs for me.

That means it's time to look at yet another content mill and see if I've had any more luck with that one.

And the answer's no.

This time I'm looking at iWriter which has a pay rate that makes other sites look positively generous. In fairness, you can work your way up the ranks to a place where you'll be able to earn more money and you can also take assignments directly from clients, which should earn you more.

Regardless, entering at Standard level, which you will, provides a rock-bottom earning rate of barely more than 0.5 cents a word.

I've been offered plenty of jobs by iWriter, so it doesn't suffer from the major flaw that Crowd Content and Zerys did. However, the vagueness of the assignments in Copify has tended to be replicated here.

But the main obstacle I've encountered with iWriter has been the extraordinarily high rejection rate by the clients. So far today, iWriter has offered me three jobs. One of them was by a client with a 52% rejection rate, another by a client with a 28% rejection rate - and the third by a client with a walloping great big 80% rejection rate.

Needless to say, I'm not even going to bother trying to write an article if it has that high a chance of being rejected. This is especially true if the brief is so vague that it's anyone's guess what the client even wants you to write about.

Overall, I'd say iWriter isn't totally without some sort of hope. There's certainly plenty of work to be had and it's not generally demanding work. However, the initial low pay rates and the high rejection rate means you have to go into it with the view that you're there to get experience and with a strong eye on getting promoted through the ranks as fast as you can.

If you'd like to sign up with iWriter you can do so via this affiliate link, which will make a modest sum of money for me if you do so.

MySurvey - I'm not sure what it's there for.

MySurvey is a very strange case because I really don't know what the differences is between it and Global Test Market. It looks like it, it acts like it and it seems to carry the same surveys as it.

Unfortunately, it also tends to have all the same problems as Global Test Market. Pages can take an eternity to load, there can be problems logging in and the surveys themselves are frequently stricken with technical errors that mean they don't always credit or complete.

On top of that, like Global Test Market, it uses an arcane points system that seems to be designed to make it not totally clear just how much a survey is paying you.

Also like Global Test Market, there's a fair amount of getting screened-out of surveys involved and it can take a fair amount of work to reach the basic payout threshold.

Although MySurvey has a referrals system, I deleted my account with the site, several months ago, so I definitely won't make any money from it if you sign up for MySurvey by using this link.

Payment method: PayPal and various gift vouchers. Minimum payout: $10. Time for payouts to be processed: Variable. My earnings in the last week: N/A My rating: 3/10. JOIN MYSURVEY.

Zerys - the content mill that's not been a content thrill.

I do sometimes think I'm doing this wrong. I have noticed that other sites dedicated to how to make money online seem to spend all their time enthusing about all the great ways you can make a mint from various things, and I seem to spend most of my time saying I never make any money from anything. Still, at least you can't fault me for my honesty.

Zerys seems to be a perfect case-in-point. In the wake of my Textbroker triumph and my Crowd Content and Copify catastrophes, I signed up with Zerys several months ago, in the hope of landing some low-paid but undemanding writing work but, in the absence of many offers that I could actually tackle, I then sort of forgot the site ever existed.

In an attempt at some sort of online housecleaning, I've been going through my bookmarks and I decided to take a proper look at Zerys before I give up on it completely. However, if anything, matters have actually got worse. I had the site's, "Job Center," page open all day yesterday, with Chrome's Super Auto Refresh extension set to activate once a minute, just to make sure I didn't miss anything that might come up but there was literally not one job appeared in all that time.

Another thing that strikes me is that ,while the Zerys blog is clearly still active, with regular posts about how to make money as a freelance writer, its forum, other than the Introduce Yourself thread, hasn't had a single post made in it for something like nine months, which does give me the impression that other members might be finding it a less than busy site as well.

I can't say anything more about Zerys because the lack of job offers means I've no experience of what it's like to actually write for it. Regardless, if you want to sign up with Zerys, you can do so by clicking on this link, which isn't a referral link and, so, as always with Zerys, I won't make any money out of it.

Payment method: PayPal. Minimum payout: Unclear. Time for payouts to be processed: Usually 3 business days. My earnings in the last week: £0. My rating: 1/10. JOIN ZERYS.

Crowd Content. A source of discontent.

After signing up with Textbroker and making a modest but useful amount of money from it, I decided to try out other content mills and see if they'd prove to be more lucrative.

The second one I signed up with was Crowd Content. After filling out the necessaries, I was accepted as a 2-Star writer and looked forward to a flood of assignments comparable to those that Textbroker had been giving me.

Unfortunately, since then, nearly six months later, Crowd Content has offered me virtually no assignments at all. I think the total must be well below a dozen and what little there has been has always been snapped up before I could even click on the link to accept it. From reading around the Internet, it would appear this shortage of assignments is a common complaint.

As a result, in almost six months of being a member, I've made not a single cent from the site. Although I remain a member, I'm afraid to say that, unless something changes dramatically, I've basically written Crowd Content off as a potential source of income.

It's a shame as, if Crowd Content had even been able to match what Textbroker was offering, I'd have been happy to use it whenever I was free and available.

Should you be interested, below are its listed pay rates for writers:

• Custom Content Orders (pricing per word): 
• 1 Star: 1.2 cents | 1.4 cents 
• 2 Star: 2.0 cents | 2.3 cents 
• 3 Star: 4.4 cents | 5.2 cents 
• 4 Star: 6.6 cents | 7.6 cents 
• 
  
• Tweets (pricing is per unit): 
• Standard: $0.70 | $0.80 
• Professional: $1.05 | $1.20 
• 
  
• Facebook Posts (pricing is per unit): 
• Standard: $1.05 | $1.20 Professional: $1.55 | $1.75.

If you fancy your chances of having more luck than me, you can join Crowd Content by clicking on this link. It's not a referral link, which means I won't even be able to make money from them via the referral route. Crowd Content really is a dead loss for me.

Payment method: PayPal. Minimum payout: $10. Time for payouts to be processed: Not known. My earnings in the last week: £0. My rating: 1/10. JOIN CROWD CONTENT.

Global Test Market. A survey site with some issues.

If you've ever used any survey aggregators like Branded Surveys, Swagbucks or Qmee, you'll know that Global Test Market supplies surveys through those sites. However, it also has a site of its own.

Sadly, it's not one without problems. I've often found it slow to open, difficult to log into and hit by technical issues when it comes to accessing surveys.  Those surveys have also had a high screen-out rate.

Because of all this, I have to say that, for me, it's not been one of the better survey sites. Rewards are middling and it can take a long time to reach the redemption limit.

On top of that, the rewards system is somewhat vague. Global Test Market used to reward you with, "Market Points," which were converted to money when you cashed out. Some months ago, they changed over to giving you, "Life Points," instead, which many users quickly realised are noticeably less valuable than the Market Points had been. Either way, having either system in place, rather than just crediting you with money, has always looked suspiciously like an attempt to obscure just how little you're paid per survey.

Overall, with the technical issues, middling rewards and obfuscational points system, I'd put Global Test Market comfortably in the bottom half of the survey sites I've tried and I abandoned it several months ago, having decided it just wasn't worth the effort.

Despite that, if you want to join Global Test Market, you can do so by clicking on this link. It's not a referral link, what with me no longer being a member, so I won't make a penny out of it if you use it to join.

Payment method: PayPal, Amazon and various other gift cards. Minimum payout: Around £30. It varies. Time for payouts to be processed: Around 10 days. It varies. My earnings in the last week: £0. (My highest-ever weekly earnings: £6.74.) My rating: 3/10. JOIN GLOBAL TEST MARKET.