Subscription Service or Free Competition Listings?

Following on from MyComps Reviews Loquax – What They Do & Don’t Tell You! we thought we’d return the favour to Oxfordshire Press by reviewing their paid for service, MyComps. The only difference is we’ll be open and honest in our review.

As mentioned, MyComps is a paid for competition listing site. It does what Loquax and many other sites do, but it costs money to use. You can get a 28 day free trial, although they do want your bank details. After that it “will cost less than £2 per week, that’s less than 30p a day”. Over a year it’s just a shade over £100, although you can pay by direct debit every month.

£100!! For that you must be getting something very special in comparison to the free sites that are around? Of course they’ll be no bingo promotions or anything else advertised to you via affiliate links. You wouldn’t expect to see things that could “land you with an inbox full of spam and no prizes” for £100 would you?

What you get for your money is access to “170 new postal and web competitions every week”. Even if Loquax didn’t exist in the competitions sector, and perhaps one day it won’t, you can find more than 170 competitions a day listed in other places and that information is free.

For £100 you do get a bit of organisation in that the prizes are split into a handful of categories, but again nothing that you wouldn’t find on a free site. Loquax, for example has over 50 prize categories!

So what about the competitions that get listed on MyComps? Well, a quick scan through their recently closed lists and we see online competitions for well know sites such as Britfilms, GoodtoKnow, Classic FM, Asda, Female First, Yours, Pick Me Up, Daisy Green and Autoexpress.

Now, this Autoexpress competition was to win £1500 of Tesco gift cards and it was sponsored by Scottish Power. This is an example of a sponsored prize draw along the lines that you’ll see on MyOffers etc. It’s something we look out for and it’s something we try not to include. We’re just saying!

Anyway, for your £100 MyComps subscription fee you get access to a bunch of competitions that regularly appear on Loquax and other free sites.

So what else is there?

Well you do get answers – and that’s one thing we don’t offer, mainly because 9/10 the answers are easy and the rest of the time the promoter wants you to make the effort. There are free places that give out answers though or you can just ask on the forums, where some answers are shared.

For your MyComps subscription charge you do get a handful of postcard competitions. However, it’s worth noting that for £45 you could pick up an annual subscription to Compers Grapevine. It’s also worth mentioning that there’s also postcard competitions listed for free on Loquax (thanks to users for users) and again on other sites.

So for £100 a year, or 30p a day, you get less online competitions than Loquax. You do get answers and you get a bunch of postcard competitions. Of course you don’t get adverts for bingo like you do on those nasty free sites! Well, actually you do because MyComps promote their own Simply Bingo site to compers.

Let’s not forget that they also have promoted automated competition entry service, Prize Draw Centre. We guess that “every company has to make money to survive” even if you do pay a subscription fee.

Tale of The Tape

The “Uses Affiliate Marketing” line is important. We use affiliate marketing in a number of ways around Loquax (and our other sites). It has no bearing on the quality of the competition or the landing destination for the comper. An affiliate link usually just means if you go shopping after visiting say Play.com we might earn a commission.

A lot of sites, including Money Saving Expert (who * their links), Nectar and Quidco, use affiliate marketing to generate their revenue.

Anyway, by doing what we do it means you don’t pay £100 a year subscriptions.

Is it value for money? Well, that’s up to you to decide!!