Start Your Way Toward Gates and Buffet Type Money With Moola

Really, if you want to get that type of money, I wouldn’t suggest Moola as a starting point. Moola, still in beta, is a Web1.0 site disguised as a Web2.0 site that trades some of your time for the chance to win money. Big money. Big money if you’re patient, smart, lucky and have a lot of spare time. Although I can’t remember any of the names of the sites, there were a rash of sites in the 90’s that tried variations of this idea. Not remembering the names is, of course, a bad sign for Moola. They didn’t last and I’m not too sure Moola will have what it takes to stick it out either. That doesn’t mean that playing games on Moola isn’t a lot of fun — if not time-consuming — though.

The concept is pretty simple. Moola gives you a penny to start with. You play another person for a penny and winner takes all. Now that you have two pennies you can play somebody else with two pennies. Again, winner takes all. Win 30 times in a row and you’ll find yourself holding almost $11,000,000. Of course, to win the top prize, you’d need to find somebody else willing to wager their $5 million against you in a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. At anytime along the way, Moola will let you cash out anything over ten bucks. Whenever you go broke, Moola will hand you another penny. Every so often, I think they feel sorry for you and will give you a little extra cash to start with, the most I’ve received at once was $1.00.

So where does the money come from? Before each game you play, Moola requires that you watch a short commercial and answer a question about the commercial, then on to the game. Those pennies are coming from the advertisers and I’d guess, this early in the life of the site, Moola is pitching in as well. The site still is in beta and, the times I’ve visited, there have never been more than 300 people playing. For Moola to be a success, I think they’ll need to increase that quite a bit. There were times I had trouble finding a person to play me at the higher levels (I actually built my account up to five dollars at one point). I realize it is still in beta and likely limited to a small group of people. For Moola’s sake, I hope once it opens to the public they not only get a lot of people to sign up, but get a lot of advertisers as well. I swear I’ve seen the Dell commercial 100 times now.

The games last about five minutes, including the time to watch the commercial, find an opponent and play. Last week, I set aside four hours that I was going to play. I was sure I’d be able to cash out at least ten bucks at the end of my playing, but it isn’t as easy as it seems. Everytime I’d get an opponent that had been a member longer than I had, I’d immediately think I was going to lose. And I did. Four hours later, I had eight cents. My grand experiment to quit my job and play Moola 40 hours a week was quickly dashed.

However, if you’re either unemployed or more patient and need to earn some cash watching Dell and Orbitz commercials, I have three Moola invites I would love to give out to the first three people who post their Rock, Paper, Scissors (old-school analog style) strategies to the comments section.