Paid Survey sites

Shurakai

I've been looking for ways to make a little extra money on the side, and I stumbled upon a paid survey site.. basically those ones that you sign up for and they whore you out to a bunch of companies which send you surveys and hopefully cheques for doing them (apparently).

I know the immediate response is probably scam, avoid it at all costs etc but I'm wondering if there are any legit sites out there like this, or if its something worth doing at all.

I would link you to a site I was looking at in particular, but you would probably think I'm a site whore so I will spoiler it.

www.surveyclub.com (warning they have an annoying voice over when you go there, and I have no idea about ads or popups since I have adblock)

Tomanta

While it is certainly possible to get paid to do surveys, the pay for any given survey is almost always pathetically low for the time invested. And any site that you have to /pay/ for getting the service is definitely a scam/not worth doing (I'm not going to that link, so no opinion on that one. This is just generally how these sites work).

grungebox

I did this for a year in college using this place GoZing surveys. It was legitimate, but the surveys were long, boring and were not worth the $1, $2, or MAYBE $5 I received per survey. Also, tons of people are on these sites, so it's first come-first served for who gets to take the surveys as the companies can't afford to pay everyone. You're better off just selling stuff on eBay or taking a one-night-a-week job or something. Kaplan/Princeton Review come to mind.

On the other hand, the movie company surveys were kind of cool, though they were the longest. I took a survey regarding the film "Torque" before it was called that, and one of the questions offered several alternatives. I don't remember them all, but I think one was close to "In the Red."

Shurakai

Tomanta wrote: »

While it is certainly possible to get paid to do surveys, the pay for any given survey is almost always pathetically low for the time invested. And any site that you have to /pay/ for getting the service is definitely a scam/not worth doing (I'm not going to that link, so no opinion on that one. This is just generally how these sites work).

This site is free and they say that the quicker surveys (10 minute ones) pay around $20 while the longer 2 or so hour ones pay upwards of $150, which seems decent enough to me. Of course those numbers are probably skewed to the highest examples and it doesnt take into account hard offers like ipods and ps2's and the like (in thier faq they say companies will test you with these kind of survey deals at first to see if you will stick with it).

As for the types of surveys, directed to grundgebox or anyone else who has done this, how do they work? Are they timed, or just very large with lots of questions?

Tomanta

I looked at the site and stand by my opinion that it's shifty / not a good way to make money. I had a long post with a list of reasons, but it's not worth the space. It boils down to two things:

1) It's not, in any way, reasonable to expect a company to pay $a0 to 50,000 people (both numbers taken from the site) to take a survey PLUS pay a site to act as a conduit to survey-takers. It costs too much money, is very far from being a sound data gathering method (sample size way too large), and any company who could afford to spend that much has an established marketing department or can pay a marketing firm who has better data gathering methods.
2) The site is full of signs it is shady. The blog that has a grand total of 3 posts from one month in 2005, the "sign up by tomorrow for this great deal!" (akin to "call within the next ten minutes...") - and the info mentioned is already available on the site without registration, the "everyone else is a scam but we aren't! Oh, and the guys we link to...", not to mention the "privacy policy" that leaves it wide open to sell your info to spammers.

The type of surveys you are likely to get are "we need this info FAST" or "we have no idea what we are doing". The latter isn't likely from anyone who can pay well and the former isn't likely to have a large budget because if it was important enough for that they would use better data gathering methods.

Grungebox's experience seems much, much more realistic than what the linked site promises.

Fireflash

A site that offers you 20$ for a 10 minute survey is pretty suspicious. For a small survey like that you shouldn't be getting more than 1 or 2 dollars.

jclast

The pay is low, but if you've got a lot of downtime at the computer, TreasureTrooper is legit and offers 75 cents per survey taken and varied amounts for other offers.

If you sign up, I certainly wouldn't mind a referral off the link in my sig.

So far, I've made $60.

tardcore

I too use Treasure Trooper. Sign up with a junk e-mail account, one you wouldn't normally check because you will get a PLETHORA of spam. Just take 15 minutes out of your day and do some of the stuff on the site. I signed up and within a half hour, I earned about 6 bucks.

japan

I used to do a few of these (I had a job that required me to do very little and I had internet access, I don't think it's worth using your free time for it), but really, the amount of money to be made doing it is pretty trivial. Plus, a lot of the sites I came across tended to pay in Amazon vouchers or similar, so it's not really "pay" in the strictest sense of the word. I'd be extremely skeptical of the kind of money the site you linked seems to be offering.

I will say that on the sites I've used, if you're anything other than a bored housewife, surveys aimed at your demographic pay better.

Rhino

tardcore wrote: »

. I signed up and within a half hour, I earned about 6 bucks.

so about $12.00 per hour?

What are most of the survies? Multichoice? Can you just go though and click "random" shit?

What about having some firefox extension to fill out the "boring" details like 'name, address, email, etc' ?

MichaelLC

If you really like giving opions for money, sign up for IRL surveys.

Any major city has companies that pay people to test products, usually food/homegoods. An hour survey casn pay $20 - 100, plus unlike the Internet ones, you get to eat PopTarts or talk about the Wii (I've done both). And thye almost always pay in cash.

Look for market research or survey companies in your area.

Done a lot for these guys: http://www.plazaresearch.com/