Making money through online surveys?

Godfather

So I keep hearing about how quite a few people out there actually pull in a bit of decent side money by filling out/taking online surveys. Granted, it's nowhere near enough to live off of, but an extra $100 a month for just an hour a day at most filling out some forms could go a long way for a starving college kid.

The thing is, I'm fully aware that at least 90% of these are scams. I did some research on a few good free ones, but the pay turnout is really poor to be frank ($1 for a 20-minute survey? Are you kidding me?). Not to mention that the one site I've stuck with for the past few days has most of the survey dumping me out after a ten minute investment cause I don't qualify :? It makes me feel cheated and duped.

Granted, I have made a bit of money off of it, but that's mainly from completing personal profile options.


I am wondering, has anyone actually tried to do this sort of thing before? Maybe not even for cash, just for prizes; anything ranging from headphones to iPads. I wouldn't mind setting aside a little bit of time each day if there's even a little bit of payoff, but with getting rejected/not "qualifying" for a good amount of the surveys, I'm wondering if it's worth the trouble at all.


TL;DR - Do online surveys work in earning money/prizes?

bowen

Not really. The best I've done was linkedin with $20 amazon gift certificate every like 3-4 months.

a5ehren

You can make some money, but the $/hr is really low.

adytum

You could try Amazon's Mechanical Turk, if you like being paid literally dozens to hundreds of pennies per hour.

tinwhiskers

Donate plasma. Place I went while in school worked out to about $15 an hour, for the time it took, and it was in cash. I think it was something like $80 a week, two visits about 2.5 hours each(most of it spent waiting). Bring books you have to read for class anyways and it's like getting payed for studying.

Feral

I do surveys for Schlesinger Associates and a couple of other market research firms, and yes I do make some money with them.

The online surveys aren't really worth much. Maybe a $5 Amazon giftcard here or a $10 buy.com credit there. Nothing to write home about. If I can do a telephone interview (if I qualify), I might get $50; if I can show up in person for a focus group, I can get anywhere from $100 to $250 for a one-hour or two-hour interview. (Plus free food, and I get to have a bit of fun complaining about products that suck.)

Here's the thing. The focus groups are in major cities. I can only go to the focus groups because I live near San Francisco. And you almost assuredly don't qualify for any of the high-reward telephone interviews or focus groups unless you either have a certain type of job, or already make decent money.

See, the market research people want to find out the buying habits of people with money, so they'll ask you for your income, and unless you check one of the boxes indicating you make over $70,000/yr (or more), they probably aren't interested in you. If it's a research panel on, say, airlines, they want to talk to people who fly 6 times a year or more (for example). For cars, they might want somebody who has purchased a new luxury car from a dealership within the last four years. And they're not going to get people like that to come up to the office in downtown SF by offering them $20.

I qualify for some research panels by being a IT guy with buying power at my job. So Dell or HP might want to know: what do corporate IT departments want out of a server? They're not going to find out by asking any random dude off the street. Other professional groups get other types of surveys.

So it's a bit of a catch-22. You don't make money doing it unless you're already in a good job making a decent salary.

schuss

You have to get in on one of the industry sites like erewards.com, but unless you fit a specific demographic, you won't get good money.

fxh7421

hey i'm interested in this stuff too...what are some good sites?