***UPDATE - The SurfMiles site has closed down leaving a trail of rather dissatisfied members - of which I am one!

I have been waiting for a cheque, whoich should have arrived about now - for about £35. Imagine my surprise when I received today not one cheque but two. They added up to £48, more than I thought I would get, but not enough to cover what they actually owed me altogether. I had put some more dooyoo miles in over the last couple of months and should have had another 30 or so pounds to come.

I suppose I am lucky that I got anything - my suspicions were also aroused by the payee not being Surfmiles, but Quantitative Management Solutions Ltd.

This is where it gets a little interesting - have you ever heard of Companies House?

This is where all the information about UK companies is lodged - and they have a web site.

I found out that Quantitative Management Solutions was previously known as Surfmiles Ltd, until the name was changed in January this year. Hmmm. I can only assume at the moment, that as the website now states, Surfmiles has had to close down due to lack of advertiser support.

It also seems that Quantitative Management Solutions are in some way related to Surfmiles, and are sending out payments to members of money owed, which is encouraging.

On the web site there is now a notice that states that members should have recieved information in the last member email, which I for one have not received.

In this eventuality the web site suggests that members email emails@surfmiles.net to request that the latest member email be forwarded to them - I hasve done so and will update if or when I get a reply.

However I have not sent my password with my username as they reqest as this seems rather a strange way to carry on - it remains to be seen whether I get a reply or not.

End Of Update***

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Original Opinion follows:

The best w
ay of approaching your Surfmiles membership is to regard it as a high interest account for your dooyoo miles.

The one niggle that many have about dooyoo is that if you want to be paid by cheque the minimum amount that you can request is £50. It can seem like it takes forever to get to the magical figure of 50,000 dooyoo miles.

There is an easy way around this, with your cheques arriving quicker, and the added bonus of a little extra cash too.

HOW DO I GET MY DOOYOO MONEY QUICKER THEN?

You can redeem as little as 5000 dooyoo miles for Surfmiles.

Why is this the best approach?

10 dooyoo miles = 1 Surfmile = 1p.

The minimum amount of Surfmiles you can request is 1500 = £15.

If you redeem your dooyoo miles for Surfmiles, the minimum cash you can redeem is a lot lower.

When you request a cheque from Surfmiles it will be issued within 30 days after the end of the month in which you requested it. I have redeemed 43,000 dooyoo miles for Surfmiles so far, and will request a cheque in the last week of January. I will update this opinion when I receive my first cheque from Surfmiles. Although the turnaround time on cheques is much shorter when you request them from dooyoo, I should be able to request 1 or 2 cheques from Surfmiles every month, rather than every 6 weeks or so from dooyoo, based on my average earnings on dooyoo.

I have earned an average of £33.40 per month since I joined dooyoo. This average will fall over the course of time, because of factors such as reduction of miles awarded for reading and writing, and the slow-down of the rate at which I am writing opinions. This fall will, howver, be counteracted by a corresponding increase in the average amount I earn per opinion:

Back in September 2000, I earned an average of 96p per opinion, when the rates were 10p per read and 25p per opinion, and had then only recently dropped from 50p per opinion.

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Currently (January 2001), I earn an average of £1.84 per opinion, with the rates now stable at 5p per read and 10p per opinion.

WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT HIGH INTEREST?

When you join the Surfmiles program, make sure you download the Surfpilot. This is an ad bar similar to AllAdvantage, but with the advantage that it doesn’t seem to cause any problems with your computer, or slow down the speed at which web pages load. It is just over an inch high, and fits across the bottom or the top of your screen.

I have still have an antique 14” monitor - soon to be replaced by a much larger one - and the size of the Surfpilot is not a problem.

If you surf the Internet with the Surfpilot on you earn 30p per hour for up to 7 hours per month. You will be able to tell if it is active and earning because a green light comes on at the left-hand side, and the time spent counter, also on the left, will be registering the amount of time you have been actively surfing.

Treat this money as a bonus on top of the dooyoo money redeemed through your Surfmiles account. I am expecting my earning to settle at about £15 a month from dooyoo, as I am not writing a lot at the moment.

£2.10 is 14 % of £15 - so if you look at the money you earn with your Surfpilot active as interest on your dooyoo money, rather than as a rather small amount of money, it seems pretty good.

You can also earn money by referring others to the Surfmiles program. For every person who joins Surfmiles using your username as the referrer, you will get 50 Surfmiles=50p. You can also earn money if they surf using the Surfpilot - 10p per hour up to 7 hours - but you must match their hours. If you don not surf using the Surfpilot and they do, you will not earn any money.

HOW DO I DOWNLOAD THE SURFPILOT?

The Surfpilot can only be downloaded from the Surfmiles site. Before you can download the bar, you must fill in a short form w
hich asks for details such name, address, and a few interests. The download takes seconds, and you can then install it immediately, and run it without having to re-boot your machine.

WHAT IS THE BEST POSITION TO DOCK THE SURFPILOT?

If you dock the bar at the top of your screen (right-click on it and select top), the Surfpilot will be practically invisible to you, and will sit above the toolbars on Internet Explorer. Many people prefer to dock their ad bars in this position, as they are less intrusive when you are surfing.

I use the Surfpilot docked at the bottom of my screen - the default position when you first install it. I have changed the default skin to Ballons, which is a mid blue colour, and uses a balloon that changes colour from blue to green to show that the Surfpilot is active and earning money.

I like to have the Surfpilot at the bottom of the screen where I can see it more easily because it features advertising relevant to me, selected by monitoring my surfing habits, and because it also features a banner with links to ananova.com, which is my favourite news site. The ananova.com banner comes up every few minutes, and contains five clickable text links to breaking news stories. This is a great way of keeping abreast of the news without having to visit a site on the off-chance that there will be something I want to read.

I think the Surfpilot wins where other ad bars really fall down (like AllAdvantage) because it contains content that is useful. The ananova text link banner is a great idea. No one will wnat to keep an ad bar on their screen for any length of time if there is no content that interests them. There are plenty of links accessible through the Menu link on the Surfpilot to news, games, search engines and other useful features.

THE VERDICT

I have had a good look around the Surfmiles site, and have found it easy to navigate, and quick to load. The FAQs are informative and
straightforward, and the layout of the site is pleasing to the eye.

The process of redeeming dooyoo miles for Surfmiles takes seconds - when I refreshed the screen on the browser window I had the Surfmiles site open on, the miles were already there. I will use Surfmiles from now on, both to receive cheques for my dooyoo earnings quicker, and to earn a little “high interest” as well as using the features of the Surfpilot that are useful to me, such as the news feed from ananova.

The advertisments that I have seen on the Surfpilot so far are of interest to me, and I have clicked on several so far, which is more than I can say of my experience of AllAdvantage and Spedia.

I think that Surfmiles has an excellent product in the Surfpilot - I will be using mine whether I am earning money or not.

As per Henrik's recommendation on disclosing your Paid To Surf referral IDs, I can be contacted at assethound@yahoo.com if you wish to use me as your referrer for the Surfmiles program.

Whether you use me as your referrer or not, I would strongly recommend the Surfmiles program as a way of getting your dooyoo money in cheque form a lot quicker than if you request a cheque directly from dooyoo, as well as earning a little extra cash.