Treasure Trooper

Summary

Note: Links may award me referral rewards such as in-app points or money.

Treasure Trooper is a money making site in a similar vein to Swagbucks but with a stronger emphasis on colourful design, games and social elements. Although I’m not sure that Treasure Trooper is the fastest or best way of making extra money it does have a charm which is largely missing from the other sites I’ve tried so I think it’s worth giving it a shot to see if it works for you.

It’s also worth pointing out that if you sign up via my referral link you’ll receive a $5 starting bonus rather than the $1 you receive if you sign up normally. Treasure Trooper also have a blogger program; so if you have a blog and you’d like to discuss the site you can sign up here.

More: Treasure Trooper Hints and Tips

More like this: Swagbucks

Safe?
Pays Out?

Ratings

Earnings:
Time Commitment:
Fun:

How does it work?

Treasure Trooper is a money making site in a similar vein to Swagbucks. The main difference is that Treasure Trooper is more playful, with its emphasis on colourful recognisable characters. It also has a number of mini games and a fairly small but very friendly chat room and forum community.

They also offer monthly contests and daily group goals which pay out when a certain number of contributions have been made.

The main means of earning currency are via the offered surveys, cash offers, free trials and cash shopping which earn you a percentage of products you buy from certain retailers. In this respect, Treasure Trooper is very similar to Swagbucks.

However, as alluded to earlier there has evidently been a concerted effort to weave in social elements. For example, the chat room offers a number of features which encourage participation. These include a competition every hour which rewards the participant who completes the most surveys with additional currency, periodic “Arrow Storms” where a large number of arrowheads are fired into the chat room for collection, the dropping of a single gold coin into the chat room each hour and a weekly game of bingo.

There are also a number of collaborative daily goals on the home page each day. These are:

• Search – if a specified number of searches is reached and you contribute at least 10 of those searches you receive 1 pearl and 1 scale
• Arrowhead dig site – if a specified number of arrow heads if collected from the chosen “dig site” and you collect at least 20 you receive 1 pearl and 1 gold coin
• Daily survey – if a specified number of completions is reached all participants earn 3 dragon scales
• Cash videos – participants who view a defined number of videos receive 1 pearl if the target is met and an additional gold coin and dragon scales if they’re in the top 5 contributors

Available Currencies

Unlike Swagbucks, Treasure Trooper has multiple forms of currency which can be traded for cash and/or another type of currency. These are:

• Arrow Heads
• Platinum Coins
• Gold Coins
• Dragon Scales
• Pearls

Arrow Heads are roughly worth 1 US Cent each whereas Platinum coins are worth 1 Dollar. Gold coins, dragon scales and pearls have no explicit monetary value but have the potential to earn money if invested in prizes.

Gold coins can be traded for pieces of a treasure map or journal which allow you to progress in the $100 treasure hunt. Although this is clearly a fantastic prize I can’t vouch for whether it’s worth the time and energy to complete as I haven’t attempted it myself.

One fun feature is the possibility of hatching dragons which you can interact with, fight, breed and send on quests. Dragons can also be sold for cash.

Dragon scales can be traded for Dragon eggs and for items used to help your dragon hatch, grow and fight other dragons. Fighting can be performed at any time but there are also “fight nights” every week in the Treasure Trooper chat.

Possibly the most interesting currency is the pearl as these can be traded for referrals. For every 8 pearls you trade for a “Pearl necklace” you will be assigned as the referrer for the next two un-referred people joining the site. This has the potential of allowing you to make a passive income from the site if your referrals are active. In my experience however, most signups are not active at all – although this could just be bad luck.

Opinion

Although I’m not sure that Treasure Trooper is the fastest or best way of making extra money it does have a charm which is largely missing from the other sites I’ve tried. It’s friendly community, colourful characters, dragon tending and daily goals keep me coming back each day.

However, I have three main gripes with Treasure Trooper. Firstly, it is currently quite US centric as a significant number of features are unavailable to participants outside the country. For example, the “cash path” and two of the video sites are only for people based in the US and their shopping affiliates are largely unknown, at least in Europe.

Secondly, there are elements of the site which feel a bit unfinished. At the time of writing, the daily goal for cash video site #2 cannot be completed as the video site integration is not yet enabled. In fairness however, I have been informed that this is coming very soon and it is possible to accrue points via the video partner but just not to redeem them yet.

Lastly, almost all surveys only pay out if you complete them without being screened out – with the exception of dig site #4. Swagbucks offers a partial payout for almost all surveys which keeps me from minding too much when I hit a lot of screen-outs. I find that without the partial pay safety net I get discouraged from taking surveys fairly quickly.

The site is also fairly dated technologically but on the whole that’s unimportant. A mobile version of the site would be great though.

All in all I mainly enjoy using Treasure Trooper but tend to focus my attentions mainly on the daily goals and dragon rearing. As mentioned earlier it’s colourful, friendly and quite charming so I think it’s worth giving a shot.