1) It seems like most of them payout on a specific date each month, but you can sign up and start surfing anytime. It appears that it would be best to sign up on the first day of their surfing period, in a month with 31 days, in order to have the maximum credits to compound or upgrade with earnings for the next period.
2) It also seems that most of these calculate upgrades based on the last day of the reporting period. That means you can surf for free for 29 days or so and still upgrade to get the most for your money with the least risk. In other words, you can try it out for almost a month before putting anything in, rather than jumping right in with your hard-earned cash on the first day.
3) On 4Daily and a few others, where it pays to really watch the ads, since they give out bonuses if you're there to click, if you see something interesting, just click to open the site. It will come up in a new browser window (on IE). Then you can leave it open and click back on the surf site and not miss anything. When you finish surfing, you can go back and take your time on the sites you opened during your surfing session.
4) Some of these programs won't run in the background. They interrupt anything else you try to do while surfing. I noticed that if I hold my mouse button down--like on a scroll bar--I can continue doing something else while the surfing program continues to run in the background.
5) Watch for hidden fees if you're thinking about upgrading. For example StudioTraffic charges 2% to withdraw. Then they only pay to StudioPay, which means another fee to them. Since they don't take PayPal, that means more fees to get money in. I haven't done this, yet, but it looks like about another 10% altogether in fees to get money in and out of this program.
That's all I can think of. Please don't take my word for any of this. Check for yourself or wait until one of the experts comes along to agree or disagree, since I'm still trying to figure this all out, too.
Suz
