Many of us love watching TV in our free time. But watching TV is purely a leisure activity. You can’t make money out of it, right?
Wrong!
Like just about anything in life, watching TV can be turned into a source of income. There are a few caveats of course, but ultimately it could still be a dream job if you’re a TV addict.
Just how can you make money watching TV? Below are 5 different ways.
Become a Netflix tagger
Netflix has been known to hire people in the past for the role of ‘Netflix tagger’. This job essentially involves watching TV shows and movies on Netflix and then adding relevant tags to help people search for them.
Netflix taggers get decent pay for essentially watching TV all day. Unfortunately, job vacancies don’t come up very often and when they do there is no shortage of applications.
Having an extensive knowledge of TV and film is important for researching and categorising shows/movies – having a background within the TV/movie industry is likely to help.
Answer TV-related surveys
There are organisations that collect data on people’s TV watching habits in the form of surveys. Nielsen is one example of an organisation in the US that conducts research into people’s TV watching and music listening habits – and they pay participants to survey them.
In the case of Nielsen, participants are chosen randomly. However, there are some other organisations like Swagbucks and Earnably that allow anyone to sign up and answer surveys on various video content ranging from news clips to cooking demos.
Just don’t expect to make a lot of money from these surveys.
Review TV programmes
You could make money reviewing TV programmes as a TV journalist. This typically involves being assigned shows to review by a magazine or online publication.
Getting into this form of journalism isn’t easy and requires you to be a very adept writer. Starting your own blog or vlog is an alternative route that allows you to choose exactly which shows you review and how you review them.
Such content can be monetized by running ads on your blog/vlog – however it takes quite a lot of views to generate any substantial income.
Become a sofa tester
Instead of getting paid to watch TV, why not get paid to sit down by becoming a sofa tester. As a sofa tester, you’ll be given a sofa by a manufacturer to keep in your home.
Your job is to simply sit on it and then write a review of it detailing information such as how comfortable it is.
You can find such roles online. Bear in mind that such jobs do get a lot of applications.
Write captions for TV shows
Transcribing subtitles for TV shows and YouTube videos could be another way to make money.
As you can imagine, this requires much more active intense viewing as you need to be able to pick up every word and create accurate captions.
Therefore, if you’re looking for a more passive income from watching TV, you may want to avoid this job.
Transcribers can earn quite a bit of money and make a decent career. The most well paid captioning jobs typically involve translating other languages or doing live captions. There are many sites where you can pick up freelance jobs.
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