Having entered a few of these contests I have now acquired quite the bad taste in my mouth from them.  Basically, they are all a sham just to get people to sign up to their sites to send you crap or advertise to you.  Now I know that they have to pay for their prizes in some way, but it is just annoying how they set them up. 

At first it seems like they have a decent voting structure but then you get in there and its crap.  Either people have a lot of friends that vote for them (thank you friends who have wasted precious moments of your day voting for my cuties in these shams) or they go to your picture and tell you that you have a cute child, and “hey, come look at mine”.  Since you are a polite and amiable person, you go and vote for their child.  EVEN THOUGH THEIR PICTURE SUCKS.  I’m sure in real life their child is gorgeous but they can’t take a decent picture to save their life.  Somehow I feel cajoled to vote for them.  Why?  Because I’m a a polite and amiable person that likes to be taken advantage of…so there!

Then there are the contests where they say “no professional pictures” and people are posting professional pictures that are obviously scanned.  Glad they are keeping to their “rules”.

So, since most of these photo contests are not actually based on photo quality, but how you work their system, I won’t be entering them anymore. 

Hold me to that, will ya?