5 Annoying reasons that I consider every time I sponsor/partake in giveaway/contest thingamajoobies.

By the way, if you entered the Gift Basket Giveaway you’ve received your announcement this evening from me with your entrant discounty stuff.

Now let me get on to my reasoning and get this outta my system. FYI, I do this every time I have a contest. The annoyance factor is very low, but exists. So I’m coming here to rant about it. It’s late. I’m tired, and I haven’t ranted about anything in a long time. heh. 😛

1. Thousands of people who will never visit your site again enter to win something without even reading the rules.

2. A handful of the people who don’t read the rules will spend 10 minutes locating an e-mail address to write you and ask you what the rules are.

3. Thousands of people enter the contest, many of them use invalid e-mail addresses, even when you remind them that they can’t win if you can’t contact them. Bouncity-bounce-bounce-bounce.

4. For some reason, receiving one winner notification mail at the end of the contest equates spam, and those who entered immediately “opt-out” of a list that has a one-time mailing.

5. Reporting the announcement as “spam” to the ISP. Someone entered the contest. They subscribed to receive the notification. They entered their e-mail address, twice. It’s not spam. Ding-a-ling.

Ok there. All better. I will run another giveaway sometime in 2005! Next time I’ll just announce it here though, not list it with the Sweeps sites. I’d like someone who is around more often to win. 😀