How has comping changed in the last five years?

jane.eyre

Hi all!
I used to be an avid comper and MSE user back in the day (New account as I forgot my login details to the old one!). Comping was a real hobby for me, I found it both relaxing and exciting and every now and then, I'd win something - big or small, it always put a smile on my face. Unfortunately, life eventually got in the way and I've had a five year hiatus from the comps.

I'm getting back into it and I just wondered (out of curiosity, more than anything) if/how you felt comping had changed over the last five years? For example - I don't remember instagram competitions being a particularly big thing but they seem to be everywhere now!

Has comping changed at all? Do you enter more comps on twitter than you do online? Are there fewer effort competitions? Are prizes getting bigger or smaller?

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cathp808

Hi, I would say it is harder to win prizes and that social media holds a big chunk of the competitions.

Sunny_Saver

The xxxxooooxxxx, I would name my first born after you if you gave me your used condom, my dog's mother's second cousin's owner's aunt has cancer, if you gave me a packet of chewing gum it would improve her live. My son got married, here's a photo of the wedding night, hasn't she got a fine pair. All the better if you let her have a prize of a cuddly monkey

cagsd

As already mentioned, it is SO much harder to win than it was 5 years ago. In 2012-3 I was winning around a prize a week, some big some small but I never had a dry month. Fast forward to this year and I think I've had about 5 wins all year, an average of less than one a month.
Part of the reason is of course that there are so many more people entering now, but the main difference I see is that almost everything is on social media. Where a competition may have had perhaps 500 entries when it was a case of filling in a form on the company's website, you'll now get 5,000 entries on Facebook (or in the case of the Home Bargains etc type ones, more like 50,000!). People don't have to go out of their way to look for comps, they're just there on their Facebook feed while they're scrolling through, and it takes a second to like or comment on a post.
There also seems to be a great many more smaller prizes around, and far fewer big ones!

mjm3346

Far more daily entry competitions with small and reasonable size prizes spread across multiple sites so you can make hundreds or thousands of entries for each prize.

No free web entry for the main ITV competitions.

Whatever type of social media is "flavour of the day" will take competitions from other entry routes (as web entry forms almost wiped out postal entry, FB and TW then took chunks out of web entry forms as instagram and others are now eating into FB and TW comps)

Advents have rapidly declined over the last five years and calling them naff is harsh on anything that is naff - so many non-prizes such as hints/tips/discounts/free P&P along with no idea when Advent actually is.

On the plus side there are usually some black Friday/cyber Monday competitions (not tainted by religion like the Advents*)


*from a marketing point of view when you want to appeal to as many potential customers as possible.
Currys stopped their Adventish "wishlist" to concentrate on promotions for BF/CM.


Effort comps are quite rare and even some of them are "random" winner, it's so much easier to run them that way than have a judging panel.

dontone

Saw this post so dug out my 2012 diary to compare September 2012 to the present day.
The results were (not hard to figure out too) that I had won quite a bit of stuff by now in the month of September in 2012, compared with - so far- s*d all in 2017. I'd just come back from a trip to Amsterdam at the back end of August, where I won that on a P&O instant, and the hotel was paid for by a £500 pepsi win.
What I am saying is that it has gotten far harder to win anything decent nowadays than back then.
At one point, there was tons of big prizes up for grabs, there were games you could play to win things and generally it was easier to win something half decent. Even daily instant wins were a lot of fun to do.
Now, it's just that there are more and more people trying to win smaller prizes (is it fair to say scraps?) and a lot of stuff has shifted to things like FB Where certain folk think that they should win everything (& where begging and sob stories rule supreme) and TW.
It doesn't help these people selling their stories to newspapers bragging about their hobby and encouraging others to join in, who then come on here pretty quickly to complain that they enter 3 comps a week, been at it for 4 weeks and haven't won anything.
While it's still fun and a thrill to enter and win things, the odds have increased a lot and there are more people doing them.
Even the advents have really dropped off over the years. It's a shame.
BTW, has anybody seen the comping fairy? i thought while I was here, I'd ask about her whereabouts.
Be Lucky

Zanzib

And the magazine dailies, many of the prizes are shared across magazines in the publishers group, so more entries for the same prize or multiples of a prize.

Click to Wins are now a thing. There's a long list somewhere...

mjm3346

Zanzib wrote: »

Click to Wins are now a thing. There's a long list somewhere...

They are signposted on the road to damnation

libra10

Five years ago there weren't those horrendous picture captcha codes. Whoever thought up those instruments on torture?

lovetowinacar

Comping has changed MASSIVELY in the last 5 years.

Going back 5 years I entered a reasonable number of competitions (due to work time was limited) and had a nice number of prizes (no huge ones but lovely small wins).

I have recently returned to comping but again time limited but see that even competitions for much smaller prizes have entries in the thousands...

I don't enter FB TW INSTA GLEEM etc etc (so at a disadvantage but then again a FB comp for £100 voucher is showing 22489 entries already with another week to go..... and that requires stating how wonderful and innovative the product is so lots of gushing needed...

I used to love postal comps (old fashioned) and they are very few and far between now

SwishFlares

it's already been said, but stay away from FB competitions, unless you want to despair constantly over the mentality of people who would use a tragic life event to win a very small prize "give me a toaster cos my mum's got cancer"

how have we reached this stage?! :mad: