This post may not be entirely similar to the general style of my
previous posts, if such a style exists, but the whole point of starting
this baby is so I could talk about the things I want to talk about. This
happens to be a subject I have learned a lot about in recent years, and
I thought maybe other people could benefit from some of the information
I've gathered in that time. Please note, I am in the UK, as such I will
be dealing primarily with UK survey sites and currency, but I will give
some nods to the American sites too, plus many of them are
international anyway.
Firstly, for those who aren't entirely sure - surveys for cash is a valid
way of making money. I say this because there are some people who view
this topic along the lines of all those other "too good to be true"
money-making ideas that turn out to be scams and pyramid schemes and the
like, or perhaps similar to things like affiliate marketing which,
while valid, tend to be quite esoteric and require a heavy skill set and
investment to make them work. This isn't at all like that, although
some of these survey sites will greatly exaggerate how generous they
really are in advertisements. The truth is, as with anything, there are
downsides and upsides to doing this properly, and a lot of it has to do
with which companies you join up with.
You most definitely can make money with survey for cash schemes, indeed, you certainly WILL
if you give it a fair try, but let me make one thing very clear. You
will not make MUCH. I only get what I would consider to be pocket money,
and that's by the standards of someone who is utterly broke. What's
more, if you work full time, or perhaps even part time, it is NOT worth
the investment of time. Depending on the site, you could make
the equivalent of anything from 50p-£1 to in the best case scenario
maybe £3-£4 an hour. Note, this is an extrapolation, I'm not saying that
after 5 hours you will make around £5, rather than a single survey pays
about 50p-£1 for an hour's work. The chances of you finding enough
viable surveys to make a significant amount of money in a single day are
low.
A final word before I get to the reviews
concerning safety - though some people would assume this doesn't need
saying, it is worth pointing out that you should always be careful with
your personal information. Many of these survey companies will ask for
your phone number. Whether or not you choose to give a real one, a fake
one or pass on that company is up to you. Personally I give fake phone
numbers usually, as on the few occasions I have given my real number I
immediately got added to dozens of telemarketer databases that
still harass me daily.
Likewise, you may want to use a pseudonym and I strongly advise you dedicate an email account just to this. You will
find yourself inundated with a lot more spam than usual, although in
recent years the spam filters seem to have advanced enough to limit most
of the overspill. Bear in mind that sometimes a survey will check the
details you input during the qualifier questions against their records,
so if you are going to use multiple aliases, always remember which one
belongs to which site.
Remember that nothing is a
surefire, and there are no ways to "get rich quick", not unless someone
finds a way to upload "luck" directly to the internet. You'll only get
out of incentive schemes what you put into them, that's the whole point
of an incentive. I consider them best suited to people who are
struggling financially, and have the time to make full use of this
system, whether because they are unemployed or for whatever other
reasons. It takes time and effort, but both of these factors decrease
significantly as you get used to it and streamline your approach.
What
follows is a comprehensive list of the most popular survey sites that I
myself have used, and my review of how they hold up. After this, I will
add some thoughts, tips and advice on how to go about this, a few words
on the ethics of how honestly you should fill out the surveys and some
red flags to be on the lookout for if you want to avoid getting kicked
out of surveys unnecessarily. Please note; some of the survey sites I'll
be reviewing won't have links, the reason being, they are so far as I
am aware, invite only. If I am able, I will invite you directly using an
affiliate link if you so desire. Just contact me with your email
address.
Valued Opinions
Value for time: [***--]
Number of surveys: [****-]
Qualification rate: [***--]
Reliability: [****-]
Withdrawals: [***--]
I
decided to start with my favourite, but hear me out before you jump in
and sign up assuming them to be the best. This site makes me all warm
and runny but mainly because it is a safe bet. In terms of value for
time spent - they are actually NOT the best. You'll typically get
offered rewards like 50p for 25 minute long surveys, 75p for 35 minute,
sometimes £1 for the same period of time (sometimes even as high as £1.50 -£2). It of course varies, but the
overall payoff for your time is not as high as it is on other sites.
Another
area where VO falls short is the withdrawal method. They have a minimum
withdrawal amount of £10, meaning you must have at least this much in
your account before you can withdraw. They use a voucher system, where
you redeem your money in the form of a giftcard for various
supermarkets. I first signed up for this site because they offered Tesco
giftcards, but they have since cancelled that particular voucher
system, and now I am forced to use Sainsbury's, which I like less due to
Sainsbury's higher prices (making the fruits of my work overall seem
less valuable).
Unfortunately the ticks in the con
column continue to mount when we get to the topic of waiting. After
ordering a voucher from VO it takes a VERY long time for it to arrive.
We're talking weeks, perhaps months. I honestly don't know because by
the time they arrive I have completely forgotten that I even ordered
one, it takes that long. This is the strongest downside of using this
site, even Amazon e-vouchers, which you would expect to be quicker, seem
to take just as long.
It's not all bad, however, and
there are good reasons why I consider this to be my favourite site.
Firstly, the lack of design errors in the surveys. I don't know who
codes the VO surveys but they should be commended, no other survey site
has so few problems with their interfaces. The disqualification rate
isn't all that bad either. It's by no means the lowest, but VO seems to
avoid that nasty little problem of waiting until you completed half the
survey before deciding you don't qualify. This only goes to show that
when other sites do it, they really don't need to. They deny this, but I
think they are just taking the data and running.
VO
has a very high rate of survey offers, typically I'll get 2 or 3 a day,
most of which I am able to actually complete, with the occasional dry
spell where you don't seem to hear from them for a while. What I like
most about them is that they are not too demanding on my computer, they
can sit there patiently while you flick back and forth filling them out
without just randomly crashing, and it's overall just a safe guarantee
of money. I've withdrawn from VO at least 3 times more than any other
site.
Good consistent money from these guys, and every
once in a while you'll get a pretty decent invite offering you £3 or £4
for a single study. Worth sticking around for. If you have to leave
this review with just one recommendation, Valued Opinions would be the
one I would have to go with. They're not nearly as good or as clever or
as important as they think they are, but they definitely are a very
dependable way to make money. Albeit, not a whole lot.
MySurvey
Value for time: [***--]
Number of surveys: [***--]
Qualification rate: [**---]
Reliability: [**---]
Withdrawals [****-]
This
one is much more of a mixed bag, and I hesitate to say it is my second
favourite. The value for time is probably about the same as VO, if not
lower, but every once in a while you'll be offered a cracking deal. I
like this site mainly for the low withdrawal limit, you can claim your
earnings when you've reached as few as 345 points (the equivalent of £3)
and best of all - you can withdraw to PayPal!
I LOVE
this feature, and I do not understand why more sites don't use it.
Somehow it feels more like actual money than a voucher, plus you can
decide what you spend it on and where. Of course, you can also withdraw
to Amazon (and many other places) but I don't see the point. I don't
care for Amazon due to how retardedly expensive it is compared to eBay,
but even if you insist on wasting your money there, you could just as
easily withdraw your PayPal money to your bank and pay that way.
It
does take a little while for the money to go through, nowhere near as
long as VO, but somewhere in the order of 1-2 weeks at the most. It's
always a nice little ka-ching sensation when you get that email from
PayPal telling you a bit more money has appeared in your account. I
would like the process to be a lot faster, but considering how easy it
is to make and claim it, I'm not complaining. They used to add a little
extra to your account as a thank you even when disqualified from a
survey, which was very pleasant, but have since replaced that with
"prize draw" entries that you won't win.
Now for the
downsides - first and foremost, the survey design. MySurvey has
*horrendous* survey coding, they frequently crash for no reason, glitch
out or are just badly designed. I was once asked to provide a number
that was more than 3 but less than 4.The survey would not let me move on
until I provided this non-existent figure. It's like the whole thing
was coded by a bunch of moneys with keyboards - and not the
Shakespeare-writing kind.
But the biggest problem by far is the inactivity countermeasure, at least that's what I'm assuming it is.
If
you leave the survey untouched for any more than 5 minutes... you're
screwed. Maybe I'm exaggerating there, but I don't know by how much. You
can't tell that the survey has broken as a result of your inactivity,
it still lets you fill out the entire thing, even if it's a two hour
long survey. Then, once it's complete, and you click the submit button,
it redirects you to an error page. Oh that error page... how I despise
that fucking error page. I have seen it so many times. You will come to
hate it too, you'll see.
The support staff are
completely incompetent never answering your queries and barely able to
string a coherent sentence together when they do. You generally won't
find your problems resolved even after getting promises that they will
be and it's just not even worth the time complaining. If you're going to
use this site, you're going to have to make peace with a harsh
disqualification rate, an extremely high rate of survey glitches robbing
you of your hard-earned money, and the knowledge that there is jack
shit you can do about it.
All that aside however, you
can make a lot of money very fast, provided they are not in one of their
dry spells, which can last weeks. When they end, however, you'll
usually find yourself inundated with survey offers. Try to jump on them
quickly, they expire fast.
MySurvey has a Mobile ap for cell phones, but so far as I can tell - it's crap. Doesn't do anything.
OpinionWorld
Value for time: [**---]
Number of surveys: [**---]
Qualification rate: [*----]
Reliability: [*----]
Withdrawals [*****]
If
MySurvey is a mixed back, this place is like a bag of scrambled eggs.
In a blender. I don't know how you would fit a bag of scambled eggs in a blender but
that's still a fitting analogy for the living contradiction that is
OpinionWorld. I honestly don't know whether I utterly hate this site or
completely adore it. There is a lot to say about this relatively simple,
straightforward website, so let's get to it.
Firstly,
the best part of this site and quite possibly the best feature out of
all of these sites: You can withdraw, IMMEDIATELY to PayPal. Yes, you
read that right. You can literally click a few buttons and have all your
reward money in your PayPal account in under a minute. It does have a
high withdraw limit of £10, though that's par for the course.
Nevertheless, being able to withdraw INSTANTLY is a godsend, and for
this alone I would recommend this site.
Now... the
downsides, chiefly among which - the survey design. This site has quite
possibly the worst survey coding of any site I have ever seen. Literally
over half the surveys I attempt to take on this site immediately fail
due to some sort of bug, whether it's a redirection to that tedious "It
seems you paused the survey" page or simply "an error occurred". Most
infuriating is when this happens half way through a survey, which is an
extremely common occurrence as well. I've been robbed of more
hard-earned cash by this site than any other.
To their
credit, the staff very often get back to you when you launch a query,
and very often you'll find that they manage to get the money to
you after all Just be sure to quote the correct survey reference number
in your email, and bear in mind that they probably won't pay you for a
survey that kicked you out, however errantly, before it was 100%
completed. You will also need to show patience for the fact that for
some reason, despite making you fill out a personal details page, they
STILL refuse to send you surveys targeted for your demographic, so you
frequently get kicked out anyway. Why HAVE that information if you're
not going to use it?
This site is incredibly
frustrating to use, and combining these constant glitches and incredibly
harsh disqualification rate with the fact that they simply refuse to
take down surveys that are already quota-filled (forcing you to waste a
few minutes trying to qualify before you find out it is already full)
and their long periods in which no new surveys get added, I actually get
so angry with this place that I rage quit it at least twice a year, and
have sent them so many emails threatening to close my account that I
don't think they even take me seriously any more.
For the money, it's worth it. But you may end up paying for that purely in blood pressure and shortened lifespan.
Newvistalive
Value for time: [**---]
Number of surveys: [*----]
Qualification rate: [*----]
Reliability: [*****]
Withdrawals [**---]
This
survey site is very much in a class of its own. By that I don't mean it
is far superior to the others, merely that it is a very different
animal from your typical incentive scheme. You can't regard it on the
same terms as sites like VO or MySurvey, and if you try you'll find your
patience quickly runs out. NVL is best treated as a kind of background
earner, not something that gives you immediate payoff.
For
starters it has an extremely high withdrawal limit. £50 - that's really
about as high as it gets in this industry. On top of that, they have an
extremely low and sporadic rate of survey offers, and their surveys
have extremely harsh disqualification rates. In other words, you'll only
get a few surveys from these guys a month, and you'll be immediately
kicked out of so many of them that you'll start expecting that to happen
by default.
It will take you a very long time to reach
the £50 mark, it took me probably two years to get to my first one, and
just over a year later I still have a good £5 to go before I am due
again (I'm particularly annoyed right now as I only just got
disqualified for a £3 survey - RRRHH!) Survey glitches and errors do
happen, though nowhere near as often as MySurvey and NVS, but
annoyingly, when they do happen it tends to be half way through the
survey, and good luck getting them to compensate you for it.
The
biggest gripe most people have with this site, besides its absurdly low
rate of survey offers, is how long it takes for your cheque to arrive
after withdrawal. You can ONLY withdraw by cheque, and you have to
specifically request it by email. It takes MONTHS for it to arrive. It
took so long for me last time I had to get them to re-send it, because
I'm fairly confident they left it so long they just forgot. You need to
keep on their backs about it or apparently it just won't happen.
My
personal biggest gripe with them is their use of stupid tricky little
quality checking protocols they implement to rule out liars or bots.
Rather than just give you a captcha or ask a few simple qualifier
questions, they try to actually trip you up with confusingly worded
questions like "How many cars do you own" followed by "And how many
vehicles to you own?" which IS supposed to include cars. They engineer
silly little verbal trapdoors where if your exact phrasing drifts a
little from a qualifier question at the start of the survey to the
quality check question at the end, you can find your entire (up to an
hour's worth) work gets simply erased.
I remember one
time losing a significant portion of money due to answering a harmless
question and suddenly being subjected to this Sherlock Holmes-esque
deductive tangent where it broke down all my previous replies with a
series of deconstructive statements; "You claimed the chief income
earner was over 18, and also that you were the oldest member of your
household yet you also mentioned that you live alone, and seperately,
that you are unemployed. Indupitably, (I may have adlibbed that) you
must therefore be the chief income earner of which you spoke.
Furthermore, you went onto say this and that, but how can that he true
if this is like that?" Etc etc etc. Usually this happens because they
phrase a question stupidly as if you deliberately lure you into giving
the wrong response.
I think there is a big difference
between keeping people honest and trying to deliberately trick them into
making a mistake with these pointless gotcha questions just to
eliminate them. I dislike that sort of underhanded behaviour, treating
their own members as guilty until proven innocent. That's just a
personal grievance. Elementary my dear fucking assholes.
Newvistalive
isn't for the impetuous or the faint of heart, it is best left on the
backburner, slowly accumulating money while you go about your business,
and then hopefully you'll log in some day and be pleasantly surprised by a
full account. Don't sign up with them if you are impatient or don't take
rejection well. ...Or perhaps if you have a tendancy to overuse detective novel analogies.
Toluna
Value for time: [*----]
Number of surveys: [****-]
Qualification rate: [*----]
Reliability: [**---]
Withdrawals [*----]
I
have a complicated relationship with Toluna. Sort of like that one ex
that you never quite stop feeling conflicted around, but then you spend
five minutes with her and instantly get reminded of her annoying quirks
like laughing nasally at things that just aren't funny, or that thing
some people do where they keep saying "yes" every half second when
you're talking to them and you're like, bitch shut up, I'm trying to
talk to you and you're constantly interrupting me by telling me that
you're listening!
Once upon a time Toluna had an
enormous and dedicated community built around it. They had polls, forum
threads, topical discussions, private messages, the whole shebang.
Friendships were made there, unique traditions and communal activities
were born there. It was far more than just a survey site, it was a site
built on the idea that we can all come together and share our thoughts
on things, AND get paid for doing so.
I'm not sure what
happened, but about a year ago they fucked it all up. They killed off
the entire community, reducing the whole site to a no-frills survey for
cash site, and not a particularly good one at that. The surveys were
never its strong suit - high withdrawal requirements (80,000 points for a
£15 amazon voucher) low value for time (average survey around 1-2000
points for anything up to 45 minutes work), high rate of glitches, and
possibly the largest disqualification rate of all the other sites
combined. It even has the same slow delivery problem as NVS.
I
never liked using Toluna for the surveys alone, and now that it has
gotten so much worse, I'm seriously considering closing my account after
I'm done collecting my current batch of points. There is also a
"product testing" option, but in the 3 or 4 years I've been a member,
despite applying for the testing of pretty much every single product
they had on offer, I never once was selected to test one.
Now they
have implemented this absurd, insulting "gifties" and "lucky dip" system
where you throw all your points away like spaghetti at a wall hoping
that something will stick, it's essentially a buy your own mini prize
draw system, but of course you're never going to win. They must think
we're completely stupid, it's like if your employer walked up to you and
offered for you to gamble your wages for the chance of being the one
employee who wins a watch. Fuck that shit.
Toluna, you and I used to have something, but I'm sorry. I just can't do this any more.
It's not me, it's you.
The
following are survey sites that I am unable to do a full review of as
yet, either because I have only recently joined them, they are very slow
earners, or because of some other factor limiting my knowledge of their
trustworthiness. Please note, this particular blog post will be updated
regularly as I get to know these and other survey for cash sites over
the coming months.
Knowledge Panel
This
is an American company, so I couldn't sign up for it - hence the lack
of scoring. It's also invite-only, so I don't know how you'd go about
getting in as I can't help you there either. It does, however, look like
a pretty decent company. Not just because of their surveys, but also
the fact that if you don't have any, they will PROVIDE you with both a
free computer AND optional internet access in order to do their surveys.
I
did contact them and confirm that their computers DON'T come with
monitoring software for analyzing trends, but they do have such a
software which is voluntary. All that is required for you to keep all
this gear is that you remain active completing surveys, which they boast
at being at the rate of about 1 per week. After 36 months you get to
keep the PC and opt out of their surveys if you want.
I do not know anything about any other incentives they might offer.
Survey Network
Value for time: [*----]
Number of surveys: [*----]
Qualification rate: [*----]
Reliability: [-----]
Withdrawals [?]
If
you've never heard of this one, that's forgiveable, even if you're
already into this kind of thing. If so however, you've probably seen it
before and not realised it. Survey Network are most often used as third
party survey designers which other survey sites like VO or OW will
sometimes redirect you to. They do however have a site of their own that
you can join... and it is less than impressive.
The
whole site is about as user friendly as a paper dick with no single
section where you can search for the latest surveys, instead just one
big list filled with every survey they have ever hosted, forcing you to
click on each one randomly in the hopes that it redirects you to an
actual survey. When that happens you will be prompted with a dialogue
box asking you to confirm your age and location, upon doing so you'll...
probably be told that there aren't any surveys to complete.
But
that's okay, sometimes you'll actually GET to complete a survey before
being told the same thing anyway. As I type this I'm looking at a page
that I was taken to upon successful completion of a Survey Network
survey that says "Thank you for your Feedback! Although you didn't
qualify... etc" That's right, my reward for completing a survey is to be
told I didn't qualify for it.
And this happens. All.
The. Time. This site is even more badly designed than OpinionWorld's
surveys, its disqualification rate is through the roof, and after
between 2 to 3 years of work, I am finally at the £20 withdrawal limit. I
can't tell you how fast the transaction goes through because I haven't
done it yet, I'm trying to build up as much money in my reward fund as I
can before withdrawing so I can finally close my account on this
infernal site.
The one good thing it has going for it is
that after you complete (or fail) a survey you will usually get
immediately redirected to a page that offers you another survey,
allowing you to do two or three attempts in a single run before you
finally run out of surveys to get pointlessly kicked out of (or
patience.)
Would I recommend this site? Only as a form of euthenasia for the criminally insane.
Digital Trends Panel
Value for time: [*****]
Number of surveys: [**---]
Qualification rate: [*****]
Reliability: [***--]
Withdrawals: [*****] (Note: read review.)
This
newcomer to the market is an odd cookie. I only just joined so I'm
still getting a feel for it, but my first impressions are positive.
First thing's first - it's quite different from your typical survey for
cash site. For one thing, you can't "login", at least so far as I can
tell. This means you can't check your balance or look for available
surveys, but there's another side to this. The way the system is set up
actually precludes the need to do any of that quite well.
Firstly,
they only seem to send you surveys if and when they have surveys for
you to do. There's no reason to login anywhere to find the surveys
because if they had any for you, you'd already have taken them. Also,
and this is quite possibly my favourite part, there's no need to check
your balance and request checks or anything like that, because they send
you a PayPal payment for every individual quantity of money you earn. I
cannot confirm this yet, as I haven't at this point had any money put
into my PayPal account, but I see no reason to assume it won't happen.
The
value for time is extremely high, perhaps the highest I've ever seen.
They average out at £1 per every 5 minutes, and the first time I started
filling out a survey and saw the progress bar leap from 0% to 18%
completion after answering a single question it was a joy. The surveys
are very user-friendly, and although I've only completed about 5 so far
(one of which glitched, but to be fair I hadn't touched it for about 4
days, it should be noted however that it waits until the survey is
complete before failing on you) I'm very impressed.
The
final point I want to make about this company is that the survey aspect
of it seems to be more of an after-thought, what they are more
interested in is data collection through a downloadable web meter. I
don't know if you can join their survey panel WITHOUT having installed
this program because I downloaded it myself. They offer £15 straight to
your PayPal in exchange for having it installed for 30 days (and a
further £5 for every 30 days thereafter), and every time you launch a
browser you are given the option to opt out of being monitored. If
you're paranoid about them monitoring you anyway, this kind of thing
isn't for you.
Note: The reason I listed the
qualification rate so high is because technically you qualify for every
single survey they send you (so far as I can tell) since they are
targeted directly to your specific demographic. Without being a member,
obviously, this is all academic anyway, but as I have explained, joining
their survey panel is optional. The web meter is where the real action
is at.
PopulusLive
Value for time: [*****]
Number of surveys: [***--]
Qualification rate: [*****]
Reliability: [****-]
Withdrawals: [*----]
I'm
brand new to this baby, and it's looking AOK so far. The surveys are
not the most frequent, although nowhere near as bad as other companies,
but like DTP above they seem to be well targetted to my demographic and I
don't think I've been kicked out of any yet. Also like DTP there is a
very high value for time, about the same in fact, averaging about £1 per
5 minutes spent, which they boistrously advertize on their homepage and
seems to be pretty accurate.
One drawback seems to be the
withdrawal system, which employs a very harsh minimum withdrawal amount
of £50. Another problem with this system is they only have one form of
payout - cheque. Be sure to sign up with a name that matches your bank
account or you have have problems cashing it!
It's still too early to tell yet how good these guys are, but I've had no problems so far and earned a good few quid for a rainy day. I see no reason to assume things are going to go bad, but I've been wrong before.
(Actually I haven't, but I'm far too modest to admit that.)
Rewarded Opinions
Value for time: [*----]
Number of surveys: [-----]
Qualification rate: [-----]
Reliability: [-----]
Withdrawals: [-----]
I didn't bother linking this one, not because it is invite only, but simply because... don't even bother.
I
joined these guys well over a year ago, maybe 2, and their survey
invites dried up almost immediately. They use a points system, and my
account has been stuck on 900 points (of the required 2000 of cashout of
£20) indefinitely since then. I'm pretty sure they are not getting
snagged by my junk mail filter, they just aren't sending any invites.
It's frustrating seeing almost £10
worth of pointy goodness just lingering there in a virtual limbo,
inaccessible and impossible to add to. It's been so long now I can't
even tell you how much you earn per survey, but I do recall that it
wasn't smoothe sailing. To say I do not recomend these guys would be an
understatement. They are dead in the water.
GlobalTestMarket
Value for time: [-----]
Number of surveys: [*----]
Qualification rate: [-----]
Reliability: [-----]
Withdrawal [?]
Now
look, this is an utterly biassed and individually specific review - I
freely admit that. In MY experience, GTM is absolutely fucking terrible.
They make you jump through hoops to qualify for every survey, and when
there actually IS one to do at the end of all that, they kick you out
straight away. I made a point of explaining that I'm biassed here
because everyone's experiences are different, and somehow I can't find
anything but glowing reviews of this place (interspersed with a few
claims of having been ripped off).
All I can tell you
is that I honestly have not qualified for One. Single. Survey. It was
infuriating to the point where I just rage quit the site and never looked
back. I see no benefit in constantly inputting the same personal
details over and over again just to get shunted back the second I hit
enter. I do not like this site, and I don't see how anyone can enjoy it.
But maybe I'm just a statistical fluke, maybe they just don't like my
demographic. Either way, my experience of GTM was dismal.
No
surveys to do (despite the constant spamming of invitations) and my account has remained a very niggling, very
conspicuously gaping zero from day one. This survey site gave me nothing
but trouble.
InboxPounds
Value for time: [*----]
Number of surveys: [**---]
Qualification rate: [***--]
Reliability: [***--]
Withdrawal [?]
I
joined these guys a good few months ago but have yet to reach the
withdraw limit of £15, so I can't yet testify as to the waiting periods.
Although they do the survey thing, that's only one small part of the
site. They are more generally a third party offer site, that means they
collect deals and adverts from other companies and incentivise you to
join them.These sorts of sites are a whole different ball game from
survey for cash schemes, and I know a few of them so if anyone is
interested I can go into greater detail about that in a different blog
post some day.
As a survey site these guys are mediocre
at best. Very low value for time, often as bad as half an hour's work
for 25p. You could literally do better just wondering around outside
picking change up off the street. Their rate of survey invites is a
little choppy as well, often leaving you with long periods of dry
spells. The main focus of their site is through the slow and steady
accumilation of cash through third party offers, clickthru adverts sent
to your email address, sponsored web searches and other similar things.
If you know what you're doing, these guys aren't bad. But strictly as a survey for cash site, they are not great. I still recommend them though.
Mainly for the other stuff. Just a couple of clicks a day allows me to
slowly build up a balance, and hopefully when it comes time to cashout,
it will be a smoothe transaction.
Opinion Outpost
Value for time: [***--]
Number of surveys: [**---]
Qualification rate: [***--]
Reliability: [**---]
Withdrawal [?]
The
biggest problem I have with this site so far is the design of its own
website. I honestly don't know if it's a problem with them or if it's on
my end, but for some reason I just can't sign in. The only way I can
login to their site to check on my account is by going through the
welcome email they sent me on joining up which links me directly to my dashboard
there. I've got no idea why this is the case, but it's annoying as hell
(as is reflected in the reliability rating I gave them).
On
the plus side however, they have an extremely low withdraw limit of
£2.50, technically the lowest yet, and they claim it is an instant
transaction although I have yet to experience it myself so I cannot
confirm this. The reason being - low rate of survey invites. I've only
been a member for a relatively little while but so far they've barely
sent me anything. In fact the best way to get any action out of them is
to go to the site direct, which as I've explained is an annoying
process, for me at least.
They seem fairly average as
surveys go. They tend to rent out a lot to other companies, so it's
difficult to judge their average value for time, but so far (in my
limited experience) it seems quite good. If they truly do cash out
instantly, I would give them a stamp of recomended. We'll see.
Ongoing
reviews (that I do not yet feel comfortable enough to comment on)
include Justtheanswer, Ipsos, Shopper Thoughts, and NavteqPulse. Watch
this space to see future updates as I get to know them better. Also
under review is StreetwisetrendsPanel - who by the way I haven't heard a
peep from since joining several weeks ago and thus have been unable to
even experience what they're like, let alone add to my balance.
This concludes the review portion of this post. Now for the fun stuff.
A few words on Ethics.
Let
me be clear. I believe in market research. I believe that big companies
and corporations are ultimately slave to OUR will even if they
sometimes forget it. They answer to us. They have to. If
we all unite and speak out clearly about what we want, they will
provide, because that's where the money is. Because of this, I do not
condone the use of deception in surveys. It's easy to feel like you are
just one person who can't possibly make a difference, but that is a flaw
with all people. And that's why things generally stay so shitty.
I'm
99% sure that 99% of people can't say what I'm about to say honestly,
and I'm 99% sure that most of you reading this won't believe me when I
say it - but the fact is, I make an effort to be truthful and forthright
in every survey I do. There have been many occassions where I willingly
sacrificed a decent chunk of money just because I refused to compromise
my own integrity by giving an untruthful answer to a survey that I knew
wanted it. I take this responsibility seriously, and I give due
diligence to every single question to the best of my ability. If you're
going to do this - you should too.
The fact is
your opinions offered in these surveys DO make a difference. People DO
read your responses and those responses DO hold sway over the people who
make the important decisions with respect to the food, entertainment
and retail industries - even the government. You are being granted a
chance to have your say, to sit down the politicians and the beurocrats
and give them a piece of your mind, AND you are being paid - nay -
EMPLOYED to do so. Do not squander that responsibility just to make some
easy money off of randomly clicking your mouse. You can make that money
AND make a difference with only a little bit of effort.
Having
said all that - there are some exceptions. If a survey is particularly
poorly designed, for example a chronic lack of neutral options, i.e.,
"Do you like Tom Cruise", with answers ranging from "yes a lot" to "not
at all", but without any "no opinion" option, then I consider that
survey fair game (bad example, I know, the correct answer is always "Tom
Cruise is in the closet."). Likewise if there are coding/structural
problems, stupidly phrased questions, typos, run-on questions that do
not follow the format of the preceeding ones (e.g., Do you own a car?
No. What type of car do you own?) all of these sorts of mistakes
indicate a lack of care and responsibility on part of the survey
designer, and if they're not going to take it seriously, why should we?
At
the same time, surveys will often try to seed their own bias by asking a
series of increasingly restrictive questions until everyone except
those giving the answers they want have been eliminated from the survey.
If you're going to do research into crisps/chips, and include every
popular brand of crisps and have us state our opinions on each one, then
THAT is valuable data. If you're going to kick out everyone who says
they like pringles, doritos, walkers etc etc until only quavers is left,
then fuck you in the neck. You don't get to engineer a survey where the
only people who can possibly complete it have to say what you want them
to, otherwise what's the point of the survey?
To be
honest, doing these surveys can be a very rewarding experience, and
being asked your own opinions on things, especially yourself, can really
surprise you when an honest answer you weren't expecting comes out. You
really can learn a lot about yourself, and in no time at all you'll
find yourself shooting through these surveys very fast with no need to
lie. However, if you MUST do surveys and not take them entirely
seriously, or if perhaps you want to complete a survey you don't really
have much stake in but aren't necessarily disqualified from either -
here are some simple steps to bear in mind.
Always default to the neutral option.
If you're not going to read the questions properly, you can limit the
damage being done to the data gathering process by selecting the neutral
options. The "I don't know"s, the "I neither agree nor disagree"s. By
sticking to those, your vote is counting as a nothing. Both up and down
vote at the same time, cancelling itself out. Of course that's not
guaranteed, depending on how the data is interpreted (1000 people asked
to review a celebrity, only 200 say they like him... neutral votes
therefore count as negative votes) but this at least is the closest you
can get to doing no harm.
The survey
companies themselves tend to have some ethics problems. One of the
biggest is the old hit and run method. If a company keeps disqualifying
you when you are over half way through the survey - tell them why you're
quitting, and ditch them. This isn't disqualification.50% of a survey
is more than enough to have already ascertained if you are part of their
target demographic. No, what's happening here is they are taking the
valuable data you supplied them and running off with it, pretending you
failed a qualifier question to excuse the fact that they aren't paying
for you.
Generally speaking, you SHOULD be in the safe
zone if you've managed to get 26-30% of the way through the survey. At
that point, if it's a fair survey, you'll be on fairly safe ground to
continue answering as you please without fear of sudden
disqualification. Anything that consistently kicks you out beyond that
point is ripping you off.
You may also get annoyed
by the false advertising. While websites like PopulusLive rightly claim
their surveys are worth £1 per 5 minutes, other sites, like Valued
Opinions, stick into their every advert that you can earn "up to £5 per
survey". Which is bullshit. I've been with them for years and years, the
most I ever got was an offer for £4, which I got disqualified from
before I could even get to the first screen. Don't be disheartened if a
site doesn't pay off as well as it promised. Yes they can often be too
good to be true - but that doesn't mean they're not still good enough.
The
"Donate to a charity" option. This is a feature that many survey sites
have, usually sitting right next to the withdraw button like a big,
glaring eye.
Look, if you're
doing surveys for cash, the chances are you're not well off. You're not
obligated to break your back trying to scrounge up some spare money just
to pass it off to someone else. Life isn't a Disney movie, if you can't
make ends meet you have to take care of yourself. That doesn't mean
don't look out for others or give back when you have wealth to spare,
just that there's no reason to feel guilty for claiming your rewards. No
matter how bad a situation someone is in there's always someone worse,
you can't worry about all of them all the time.
Besides,
these sites most likely don't actually respect your donations and
actually give that money to charity. It's like those penny bins in
McDonald's which they SAY is for charity. Does anyone really believe
they hand that shit over? Hell no, they just tip it into the tills at
the end of the day and some fatcat in an office (that I like to picture
as Ronald McDonald with shades, a Bluetooth device and a bowler hat)
chucks a token amount of cash at the nearest charity and calls it even.
The point is, don't be emotionally blackmailed into throwing your money
away, take care of yourself, then when you are in a more stable
financial situation, you can take care of others without self-detriment.
Tips and red flags.
1:
Read the description. First and foremost, always pay attention to the
description of the survey. Surveys by Valued Opinions, for example,
always list the "type" of survey in the invite. It might say
"technology", or "food", something like that. Then, when you get asked
about twenty different preferences you have, you know what to be on the
lookout for. And when it asks you, in a "food" survey, if you ever eat
out, you'll know to click yes. Something I like to do is click print
screen to get a screen capture of the survey description, as I've very
often forgotten what it said when it comes time to picking the right
questions. This way I have an easy way to look back and make sure I don't screw myself over by picking the wrong answer.
2:
Your job. The biggest red flag in any survey is one that will happen
right at the start: "Do you or any of your relatives work in any of the
following industries?" ALWAYS say no. They are trying to screen out
possible data conflicts, for example someone reviewing cola who works
for the same cola company might not be as objective as they would like.
Of course it's stupid to include extended family in this
disqualification question, and we're all grown up enough to know how to
be objective. I'm assuming that you are, so if so, be sure to always
click "none".
3: Matching the qualifiers to the control
questions. Remember that very often surveys will try to trip you up by
first asking you at the start of the survey a few seemingly demographic
identifying questions, such as how many kids you have, but will then ask
the same questions at the end. If your answers don't match - you're
out. If you are not being totally honest - which I do not recomend, then
at least remember what you picked. Also pay close attention to the
exact phrasing of the questions, to avoid those silly, pointlss gotcha
questions like NVL likes to use.
4: Leading
questions. "Have you ever used Colgate toothpaste?" I'm assuming that
what you should say here is obvious, but just in case it isn't I'll
explain anyway. While I support total honesty in surveys it is often the
case that, as I already explained, they will continue to rule out more
and more people with each question that eventually they are left only
with the responses they want to justify their research. In these
circumstances I consider it fair game to be dishonest. If they are
clearly angling for a certain answer, just give it to them. At least
then someone gains from them screwing people over with their false data
gathering tactics.
5: Hidden tripwires. If you're
breezing through a survey tapping away at all the neutral options, as I
have advised, you may find yourself suddenly get kicked out for no
discernable reason. Why? Because of a mid-way quality check question.
These are easy to miss even when trying to do the survey legitimately,
so keep an eye out for them. They'll typically take the form of "Please
tick __ to mark your place in this survey", and unless you select the
stated option for that question - you're out. Another, somewhat related
issue is that sometimes surveys have time traps, where if you haven't
spent enough time doing the survey, you get disqualified under the
assumption that you are just cheating. Fortunately I tend to do several
surveys at the same time, switching back and forth, so this hasn't
happened to me, but if it does I will be livid. If you do this long
enough you learn to recognize a question and identify the correct answer
at a flash, so even doing them properly can be a very quick process. I
recomend using the same tactic I do, and doing several at once. Just be
wary of the ones that expire too!
6: Behaviour of the
survey. It takes a while to develop a feel for this, but sometimes after
answering a specific question you'll notice that the survey takes
longer to load the next one. It changes a little, maybe the page
restructures, maybe the whole page redirects rather than just the spinny
circle loading. You need to have been kicked out from a good few
surveys to identify the difference between that, and simply the loading
of a new section of the survey. Once you get a feel for it, and you know
you are being kicked out, try hitting the back button. Some surveys,
very few, will let you go back and try again without penalising you.
It's getting harder to pull this off as people improve their security,
but if you've made a mistake, clicked the wrong option or misunderstood a
question and you're about to lose money because of it, it doesn't hurt
to try. Remember some sites keep permanantly trying to redirect you
forwards, so keep going back until you reach a page that stops, or try
hitting the stop loading button in your browser to stay on a safe page.
Best of luck with your future survey-doing adventures, I hope these guides help you avoid unnecessary exclusion.
As
a final note, I will again leave you with the assurance that surveys
for cash IS a real thing. It can make you money, but it's not going to
be a substitute for a job. On the plus side you can do as few or as many
surveys as you want to earn yourself some extra pocket money. In time
you'll learn to tune out what you're doing and just relax, sit back,
play some music and chill out while your hands do all the work. It's a
great way to help get by when unemployed - trust me, I know, and it's
invaluable when Christmas comes around if you save up all your vouchers.
Just remember to do so responsibly, safely and as honestly as possible.
If
anyone can think of any companies I have missed, I'll be glad to hear
about them and give them a try. Any and all future reviews will be added
as an edit to this post, NOT future posts, but as stated, there may be
future posts reviewing different incentive schemes.
Thanks for your time.
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