Where Everyone Has a Chance

Most sweepstakes entrants spend a lot of time thinking about prizes from the winner's perspective — what they'd do with the cash, where they'd go on the trip, whether they'd keep or sell the car. Far fewer think about prizes from the sponsor's perspective, which is...

There is a specific and particularly frustrating way to lose a sweepstakes prize, and it has nothing to do with the randomness of the drawing. It happens after your name has already been selected, after the excitement of a win notification has arrived in your inbox,...

If you're entering sweepstakes with any regularity using your primary personal email address, you already know what happens: your inbox becomes a mixture of things that need your attention and an ever-growing flood of promotional emails, entry confirmations, and brand...

There's a category of sweepstakes that doesn't get much attention in online communities, doesn't show up prominently in sweepstakes aggregator sites, and rarely generates the kind of excitement that drives thousands of people to enter simultaneously. These are the...

Most sweepstakes entrants treat the confirmation email the same way they treat a terms and conditions page — a formality to be acknowledged and immediately ignored. You submit your entry, something arrives in your inbox, you register vaguely that it showed up, and you...

Most people who are new to sweepstakes think about their odds the same way they think about a lottery ticket — you either win or you don't, and the outcome is entirely outside your control. That framing isn't wrong exactly, but it's incomplete in a way that leads a...