These are all from this morning, 12 February 2026:

"Put foil around your doorknob when home alone...." (yes the infamous clickbait ad is still alive and well!)
a 'Must Play' 30 second video ad: "Eleven benefits you should ask for if you are on Social....." (where the 'skip ad' button doesn't work)
An animated, and talking, "floating ad" that follows you down the page when you try to get away from it (but it does let you know you forgot to re-mute your speakers after you checked the Olympic news)....

      It's been just over a year since we posted what, at the time, could well have been an obituary for an iconic American sweepstakes house, see link below. And about two years since the court settlement that pushed that company into the 'death spiral' it is still in.

      And, while the 'house' hasn't closed up shop and somebody said "whoever is the last one out, turn off the lights and make sure the door is locked." It most certainly looks like that is on the horizon.

      Somewhere in what a couple of generations ago, would have been a 'smoke filled room', a board of directors would have had a 'come to Jesus' meeting with the marketing staff, and their ad agency, and people like that, and they would have spent a day or two arguing and throwing numbers around, and after a bit of shouting and some thinly veiled threats, they would have come up with a new business plan to put the thing back on track. Or, failing that.... "last one out turn off the lights."
      That was then.
      Last year, whatever remained of the Publisher's Clearing House brain trust decided that in answer to the court's charges of deceptive advertising and, possibly, not actually delivering the prizes promised, their first best course of action was to ..... .... well.... do more of the same, with the added wrinkle of getting people to pay them to enter their 'free' sweepstakes.

      We're still waiting to hear what the FTC thinks of that development. Although with the current mess the US Federal Government is in, they probably have other things on their minds, such as saving their own skin.

      Let's look at the public faces of PCH and see what we see.
      What we see, mostly, is ads on the old PCH.com, but there's something else going on, which we'll get to in a moment.
      The ads on the site have become even worse, more of the video ads are 'unskippable' (either there is no skip button, or it doesn't work, which take you into endless chains of pages with even more ads (arbitrage advertising, which is examined in the first article, link below)) and in some cases no worthwhile content at all, and a good many of them are for PCH's shopping site, which, as we said, we'll come back to.
      And in the original article we thought it funny when you had three layers of ads on the page, with one popping up to cover another banner, which covered another ad. Now, that's almost standard, with the added attraction that some 'float' down the page so you can't get away from it.

      As for the free games, there's fewer of them now than there were when we did the original article. Evidently somebody in that 'smoke filled room' thought it best if PCH moved to be on the hook for even fewer prizes now than they were.

      Now about that other development.

      PCH has always been on a mission to fill up your mailbox, from every possible sub-domain of PCH.com. Quizzes, VIP, Lotto, and so on, they ALL had steam engine driven robot mailers churning out multiple emails, not per day, per hour. In some cases three or more, per hour. No, we're not kidding, and some of them ran 24 hours a day.
      They still do.
      But now, about half of them are promotional ads for www.pchshopping.com saying things like (the caps are theirs and these are all from an hour or so the morning we produced this article):

DON'T KEEP MISSING OUT....
(next email)
You could be holding the keys in no time
(next)
...getting IN to WIN has never been this EASY!
(and one more, and this was an email, not a web page!)
....when you become a PCH Member, you can claim thousands of automatic entries for this amazing prize, plus access to exclusive rewards like merchandise discounts and more. Don t sit this one out. Keep going to see how easy it is to get in to win today.
To Enter For Free, Please Visit The Official Rules On The Next Page.

"Become a PCH Member and Get In To Win!
"Just Choose What Works Best For You - A Membership Plan or A One-Time Reward Pack."

"Tip: We recommend going for the most entries because it gets you the most chances to win!"

      You can spend from $10 to $150 a month for your 'chances to win'. And, it is in their vested interests to push you to send them the most money possible per month, both in membership and in the purchasing of PCH branded 'stuff', shirts, hats, can coolers, lunch bags, all with PCH advertising on them (not only are you paying for an entry to win, you are paying to advertise them!), to increase your number of entries to win.

"HERE ARE 2 WAYS YOU CAN GET IN TO WIN THEM
SHOP NOW     BECOME A MEMBER"

      And you won't, until you get to the fine print in the gray area at the bottom of the page. And when you go there, it doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence that your entry has been submitted, but you will probably get even more spam email from them. And, as they now have your phone number, that's in play as well. And for sale to their 'partners' as a real working number that they have permission to do with as they see fit. And what they see fit to do with it is to sell it for fun and profit, mostly profit, to anybody they can find with a check that won't bounce. We'll come back to the rubber check thing in a minute.
      From the PCH privacy page (emphasis is theirs):

"Why does PCH collect personal information?
PCH collects personal information for the following purposes:
Relevancy Purposes, to provide Users with the most relevant experiences on our Website and mobile applications, including sweepstakes opportunities, that we think are likely to be of interest to you.
(-several other points-)
Marketing and Advertising Purposes, to enable parties such as Targeting Partners, Marketing Partners and Acquisition Partners to provide you with the most relevant experiences and ads for products and services that are likely to be of interest to you...."

"Does PCH disclose personal information to external parties? PCH discloses personal information to external parties in the following categories:
Targeting Partners, such as data management partners or other external parties who use data....
Marketing Partners, Acquisition Partners, Service Providers, Media Intermediaries, Data Management Partners, Reporting Partners, Supporting Partners"

      One of the things they do repeat on almost every page is that you do not have to make a purchase to win. This is in that gray area at the bottom of the 'shopping giveaway' page already mentioned and linked below, (caps and bold are theirs):

      Which begs the question, if you do not have to 'pay to play' why are they pushing paid memberships and branded junk? You still CAN NOT buy a book or magazine from "Publisher's Clearing House" which is where it started. You also can not buy a child's play tea set or a fine selection of wildflower seeds or a handy 'bear claw' ice scraper like you could for several years recently. No. They no longer sell anything except promotional stuff with their own name and/or logo on it.

      Then you go back to play a game on the original pch website and see the overall quality of most of their ads. While they do have ads for well known and respected (and respectable) products and services, there's A Lot of the other, especially the third party filler ads from places like 'outbrain' and 'taboola', not overly well known for their high quality advertising for well respected national products, such as the 'tinfoil' and '11 SS benefits' ads we led with.
      Well, that's why they are selling T-shirts. Without that income, they might be 'turning off the lights.' And that group in the painted van that brought the big checks and flowers... the check bounced..... No, really. It did.

      So when you read about how some people that had won a "a payment a week / month for life" prize have been told that those payments have been stopped because.... well, it wasn't the winner's lifetime that the prize was good for, it was the company's, and "forever" simply ISN'T, and the company has now been through bankruptcy and what was left was sold, and making payments on prizes previously awarded wasn't part of the deal (see NYT, NPR, and Fortune links below)... you wonder why you're still playing.
      Well, if you're the Desk, you were still playing so you could see what happened after the first article, and then do a follow up. Which you are now reading.
      As to whether we are going to keep playing, that remains to be seen. We will NOT however, be buying a membership, or a drawstring bag. It should be noted that their drawstring bag with their logo on it costs thirty dollars, the same thing, with somebody else's logo on it, can be had for free from any number of 'home shows' or 'living expos' or even county fair booths on a regular basis.

      The conclusion here is simple, and we'll take it a step further from the intro to the original article, where we stated that your grandmother wouldn't recognize the company that used to send her the big envelope full of magazine stickers.
      Not only would grandma not recognize it. You might not. Because whatever PCH was, it no longer is. And the value that was in the well recognized "Publisher's Clearing House" name, is gone.

The Original Media Desk article from the fall of 2024:

"If you are of a certain age, you may remember being at your grandmother's house when the mail came. And there might be a colorful oversized envelope that, when opened, was full of large sheets of stickers, and perhaps a game of sorts where you had to find the sticker with a wheelbarrow full of apples and put it on the correct spot on the game card to be eligible to win an extra prize...."
"Is Publishers Clearing House circling the drain?" https://themediadesk.com/newfiles7/stickers.htm

Outside links as mentioned above. All will open in new tab/window. All were working as of date of posting.

"PCH Digital, LLC ('PCH') respects your privacy." https://privacy.pch.com/

"Our Very Best Prizes Are All Right Here!
And You ve Got 2 EASY WAYS To Get In To Win Them.
Here's What You Can Win
It's Back! Enter For It Here!
Win The $1,000,000 SuperPrize"
PCHShopping - Giveaways https://www.pchshopping.com/pages/giveaways
-and-
Official Rules https://www.pchshopping.com/pages/official-rules

-AND-

12 September 2025
"Company That Bought Publishers Clearing House Won't Pay Past Prize Winners
"After purchasing the company out of bankruptcy protection for $7.1 million in July, ARB Interactive said it's not responsible for past prizes, casting doubt on any further payments for those winners."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/business/pch-sweepstakes-bankruptcy-winners-unpaid.html

"How Publishers Clearing House's bankruptcy is affecting winners" https://www.npr.org/2025/09/20/nx-s1-5544498/how-publishers-clearing-houses-bankruptcy-is-affecting-winners

"Publishers Clearing House, company that promised forever payments to sweepstakes winners, says actually nevermind"
https://fortune.com/2025/09/16/publishers-clearing-house-bankruptcy-not-forever-lifetime-payments/

NOTE: The above editorial is wholly and solely based on the observations and research by TheMediaDesk, which does occasionally play some of the games on PCH.com, and had won a few small prizes, a few years ago, but does NOT have their app on its phone. This article is not endorsed or approved of by anybody or anything else, including PCH. Other conclusions may be reasonably drawn from the events referenced, and you are welcome to do so at your leisure.