Are you interested in getting paid for giving your opinion on products and services you use every day? Becoming a member of an incentive-based consumer opinion panel can be a great opportunity to do just that. Unfortunately, it can often be difficult to separate the legitimate panels run by reputable market research companies from the scams.
One of the easiest ways to tell if a paid survey site is a scam is to take a look at the incentives it offers its panel members. Legitimate paid survey sites offer reasonable incentives to their panelists for the time it takes them to complete surveys. An average survey from a reputable consumer opinion panel will take between fifteen minutes to half an hour to complete, and panel members will usually receive anywhere from $0.50 to $5 after completing the survey.
Some legitimate paid survey sites do offer much higher rewards for certain surveys. These are usually follow-ups to screening surveys that panelists have completed. They usually require more time from the panelist, and often require participation in an interactive chat session. While the rewards for this type of follow-up can be extremely high compared to typical paid surveys-Greenfield Online occasionally offers its panelists up to $50 for participating in interactive sessions-opportunities to take them are generally very few and far between. High-paying surveys are the exception, not the rule.
Legitimate paid survey sites will never make claims about the amount their panel members can earn from them. They are operated by market research companies that are paid to collect information from various demographic groups for manufacturers of products and providers of services. Because they offer surveys targeted at a wide demographic range, their panelists' earning potential is extremely varied. Legitimate paid survey sites may disclose the average number of survey invitations their panelists receive in a specified time period, but they will never even hint that there is a possibility of their members earning an hourly wage completing paid surveys for them.
Something that a legitimate paid survey site will never, ever do is require its members to input credit card information of any kind. They will require panelists' addresses if they issue payments for surveys by check, or a valid PayPal email address if they offer payment by that method. Aside from this, legitimate paid survey sites have no need for a member's financial information.
Consumer opinion panels will occasionally ask their panelists to sample products for manufacturers. These requests are almost always follow-ups to surveys a panelist has already completed. Legitimate market research companies will provide the product to the panel member completely free. They will never require panelists to visit third-party websites or sign up for free trials of a product or service. Any survey site that asks its members to do this isn't a legitimate survey site at all, but a variant on the popular get-paid-to site model. Rather than providing consumer opinions to manufacturers and service providers, these sites are often affiliates of the products they offer members to test, and get paid every time a member signs up for a trial offer.
Legitimate survey sites constantly ask their panelists to update their demographic profiles with current information. Some of them, like Greenfield Online, offer simple questions to panelists before they complete a survey through the website. Others, like Pinecone Research, may send short screening questionnaires based on the surveys currently available. Legitimate sites will require basic demographic information from all of their members when they sign up. This will typically include annual household income, highest education level completed, age, nationality, and ethnicity. Sites that do not request any of this information should be avoided; without this basic information, a legitimate paid survey site would not be able to properly identify which of its panelists fit its clients' demographic requirements.
In the end, the easiest way to tell if a paid survey site is legitimate is to ask yourself if the promises it make sound too good to be true. Legitimate paid survey sites don't make unrealistic promises. They won't require you to purchase anything or submit your credit card information to them. By carefully considering what a survey site has to offer you, and understanding what you can expect from a legitimate paid survey site, you can protect yourself from the majority of the scam survey sites out there.