Was Your Competition Targeted by Automated Entries in April

It’s time for another round up of sites that attracted automated competition entries last month. Hopefully, each and every month these lists will get smaller and smaller. Not because the competitions have been pulled, which potentially could happen, but because promoters have started to look under the bonnet of their promotions and are keen to reward people who have visited their site rather than someone who’s not made the effort. First under scrutiny are the biggest culprits. Interestingly the value of prizes for April (as announced on their website) was around £77,000. This is £100,000 less than March.

Win24 Automated Entries

Anyway, here’s just some of the sites who need to go back and look at their databases!
Pork Pie, Arriva Trains, Energizer, Four Four Two, Evo, Tate, Budge, Crabtree & Evelyn, Bon Marche, Maltesers, Carphone Warehouse, Cruise.co.uk, TP Toys, Musto, Idlewild, Kellys of Cornwall, CBS Drama, New Look, NSPCC, Debenhams, Gay Times, Schuh, Vango, Yahoo, Eden Project, Clippy Kit London, Value My Stuff, Feel Unique, Beko, Dorothy Perkins, The AA, Robert Dyas, Lady M, Womens Fitness, USC, Cartridge World and many more. This represents just a handful of the sites. We’d expect that a lot of these sites would notice that they’re getting bulk entries and we’d hope that they’re disqualifying them. Unfortunately getting information from these sites about their automated entry policy is like getting a picture off Barack Obama!

More Sites Targetted

The other site that publishes their list of competitions entered still likes to target the magazine publishers. Here’s just some of the sites they went for in April: Instyle, Company, Pocket Lint, Mature Times, Homes and Gardens, Nairns, Linenme, Hollands Pies, Go Korea, Green Life, French Connection Wines, BBC Good Food, Company, My Family Magazine, People Love Presents, BHS Menswear, The Telegraph, The Mirror, Sheerluxe, Ernest Hones, H Samuel, Joanna Trollope, Mccains, Channel 4, Buyagift, My Deco, Maxim, Sky Sports and again sadly many more.

A Comping Strategy

We know that some compers are concerned about these services. So here’s some extra information that might help your comping strategies. The latter service targeted 207 competitions and most of those were closing on April 30th. The same applies to the first service. They did approximately 160 competitions and again most were closing at the end of the month. As we said last month it may well be that your time is better spent away from the end of the month competitions. Secondly, the number of competitions accessible in a month is in the thousands. These services tend to also always target higher end prizes. We think in part because these competitions (end of month & expensive) will attract more entries and therefore perhaps don’t get noticed so much?

Highlight On The Listings

Some users have requested that we indicate on our listings the sites featured. It’s something we can do, but remember everything is in retrospect. These are competitions entered by AES’s in April – it may be that the sites listed do disqualify these entries or they’ve changed their competitions since. Of course if the same names start appearing month in month out, then we’ll look at adding something to the site. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, and that more sites start to be as vigilant as Sixtyplusurfers!