Much of what is said and written about paid online surveys is true. For example, you won’t make much money from them – certainly not enough to earn a living. They can also take up a lot of your time for relatively little reward in return.
But, with the right knowledge and an efficient approach, you can reduce or even overcome some of these disadvantages. In this post, I will share with you all you need to know about paid online surveys. I will tell you how they work, and how to get the best return on your time.
Learn to apply these techniques and you may even find it worth you while to dedicate some time towards making a little extra cash from paid surveys.
- What are Paid Online Surveys?
- Who are Paid Online Surveys For?
- What are the Advantages of Doing Online Surveys for Money?
- Disadvantages of Paid Online Surveys
- Is it Wise to Join Multiple Paid Survey Sites?
- Survey Originators or Survey Aggregators?
- Survey Originators
- Survey Aggregators
- The Pros and Cons of Taking Surveys at Originator and Aggregator Sites
- How Much Money Can You Make from Surveys?
- How to Choose a Paid Survey Site
- Our Recommendations
- Conclusion
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What are Paid Online Surveys?
Online surveys are an easy and effective way for researchers to obtain valuable information from the general public. Businesses can learn how customers choose and use products; they can help academics or governments to understand how the public react to different situations, or what opinions people hold about various issues, for example.
They can break down the responses provided into all sorts of categories, such as age, gender, income, shopping habits and a myriad of other factors.
In return, survey-takers receive a small reward to compensate them for their trouble and their time.
Anyone can access and complete surveys online, and get paid for doing so.
Who are Paid Online Surveys For?
Paid online surveys are for:
- anyone looking for an easy way to earn a little extra income, without having to learn new skills, or make much effort.
- people who have some idle time and want to use it profitably.
- those who want to influence the development of new products or policies.
- those who enjoy the occasional coffee or beer but can’t afford to use their regular funds for these little luxuries.
- teens or students looking to make a little spending money.
What are the Advantages of Doing Online Surveys for Money?
They are really easy to do
This is, by far, the best reason to earn money with paid surveys. You don’t need any special training or skills other than the ability to read and understand the questions.
Paid surveys don’t feel like work.
A survey question may sometimes require a written response, but this is rare. Most survey questions are multiple-choice, and only need you to make one or more selections from a list of provided answers.
There are paid surveys for everyone
Surveys are available for people from all walks of life. In general, you don’t need to belong to a specific group in order to receive survey offers.
Individual surveys target specific groups of people based on factors such as age, occupation, relationship status or income, for example. This is your demographic profile. Surveys will regularly screen you out because your profile does not fit their required demographic. At other times though your profile will exactly fit the target demographic. So, if at first you don’t succeed, just keep trying.
Paid surveys are plentiful
Unlike many better-paying methods of earning money online, which often offer opportunities too infrequently to make them worthwhile, there are lots of paid surveys.
For example, it’s not unusual to be offered a survey that matches your demographic immediately after you join one of the better survey sites. It’s common to receive at least one survey offer in a day and frequently, two, three or more. This is especially true if you happen to live in one of the top-tier English-speaking countries like the US, Canada, UK, Australia or New Zealand.
Paid surveys provide a consistent income
Even though the income is very small, surveys are so plentiful that you can rely on earning more or less the same amount month after month. We can’t say the same for many of the other casual online earning methods out there.
Disadvantages of Paid Online Surveys
High rejection rates
You will be screened out of surveys many times compared to the number of surveys that you attempt. The rate varies from person to person, and depends on your demographic profile, as well as your approach. You will have fewer rejections on sites that capture and store your demographic data, and which only offer surveys that match your profile.
Small reward vs. time spent
Paid surveys pay very little when you consider the amount of time that you can spend doing them. This is particularly true if you follow the haphazard and uninformed approach that most people take. Because of this, many will reach the conclusion that the money earned is not worth the time spent. For this reason, surveys should only be one of the ways that you use to supplement your main income stream. They should not be the primary income source for you.
Is it Wise to Join Multiple Paid Survey Sites?
Many review sites do not make a distinction between the different websites that offer paid surveys. They recommend joining as many sites as possible, to maximize your chances of success.
If you do this, though, you also maximize the time that you spend doing surveys.
Because originators frequently distribute their surveys to multiple aggregator sites, you’ll spend a lot of time attempting surveys that you’ve already completed, or have already been screened out of. Most surveys won’t allow you to complete them more than once.
You’ll be wasting a lot of extra time, without increasing your earnings to the same extent.
Survey Originators or Survey Aggregators?
Before joining any paid survey site, it’s best to know what type of survey provider it is. There are basically two kinds of survey providers. I call them survey originators and survey aggregators.
I’ll explain the difference between the two. I’ll also show why it’s important to distinguish between them when you’re planning to make money from paid surveys.
Survey Originators
These are the creators of paid online surveys. They package their customer’s questions and desired demographic into a form which they present to survey-takers and capture their responses.
A few survey originators have their own paid survey websites, with their own survey-taking audiences. On these websites, they offer their own surveys to you, but never surveys from other originators.
Most originators also make their surveys available to survey aggregators. This ensures that their surveys have access to the largest audience possible. I tell you more about survey aggregators in the next section.
Some survey originators restrict the distribution of surveys to audiences on their own websites, and do not share them with aggregators at all, but this is very rare.
Most survey originators do not have their own survey websites or audiences, and rely completely on survey aggregators to expose their surveys to an audience.
Survey Aggregators
These survey providers do not create surveys themselves. Instead, they present you with a single platform from which to view and complete paid surveys from several different survey originators.
Survey aggregators come in a few different forms:
Paid survey websites
Survey aggregator sites feature lists of available surveys. The lists will usually mention the name of each survey’s originator, the estimated time that the survey will take to complete, as well as the reward that you will receive for completing the survey successfully.
Aggregator websites manage the whole paid survey process for you. Regardless of how many surveys you do, and from how many different originators they come from, you only interact with a single entity. The survey aggregator website records your survey activity and your rewards, provides support when required, and processes your payment when you make a withdrawal claim.
Survey routers
Survey routers usually indicate the reward that is payable for a completed survey. But, unlike the lists found in paid survey websites, they do not present you with a list of surveys to choose from.
You won’t know whether any surveys are available for completion until you click on the router to activate it. The router will then query each of its sources to see if any surveys are available. If it finds a survey, it will offer it to you for completion.
This is a slow and time-consuming process. Since you cannot know that you will find a survey, you can spend a lot of time doing this and never be presented with an opportunity to earn a reward.
Offer walls
Offer walls are independently-managed lists of offers. These often include paid surveys. Similar to most survey originators, offer wall owners do not place their offer walls on their own websites. Instead, they make them available to Get-Paid-To (GPT) websites, such as survey aggregator sites.
Offer walls rarely contain stand-alone surveys, and it’s much more common for them to offer one or more survey routers. For this reason, you can think of an offer wall as an aggregator of survey aggregators.
The Pros and Cons of Taking Surveys at Originator and Aggregator Sites
Originator Site – Pros
Originator sites generally offer the the best compensation
That’s because the reward is undiluted by aggregator middlemen taking their cut.
Having said that, I have seen a very few instances where this was not the case, but and it was possible to earn more for a survey at an aggregator’s website.
Originator Site – Cons
The number and range of surveys is limited
You only get to do surveys created by the originator’s site that you’re on. To get access to more surveys, you would have to register on multiple websites.
High minimum payout balances
Most paid survey websites require you to accumulate a certain minimum balance before you become eligible for payment. This balance is generally much higher on originator sites than it is on aggregator sites. This means that you must wait longer to receive payment from an originator site.
Spidermetrix and PaidViewpoint, for example, require you to accumulate balances of at least $30 and $15 respectively, before they will pay you. If you consider that originator sites offer far fewer surveys than aggregators do, it could take you a lot longer to be in a position to withdraw your earnings from a survey originator site.
By comparison, most aggregator sites require a minimum of only $5, while others, like Surveytime, require as little as $0.50.
Long payment delays
Curiously, several survey originator sites specify rather long delays for processing withdrawals. Thirty days, or more, is not uncommon.
This is strange because, if you take the same survey on an aggregator’s site, you get paid for the survey according to the aggregator’s rules and timelines. These are almost always far better than those of originator sites.
Aggregator Site – Pros
An aggregator site provides a single platform to manage surveys
A survey aggregator site gives you access to paid surveys from multiple sources, from a single platform. There is no need for you to manage multiple usernames and passwords for different websites.
Minimum balance thresholds for withdrawals are lower
This is true for most survey aggregator websites, when compared to originator sites
You get paid faster
On aggregator sites you usually get offered many more surveys than on originator sites. Because you this, you reach your minimum payment threshold sooner. Thresholds in general are also lower than they are on originator sites. And, since withdrawal processing times are so much shorter, you will get your earnings in your hands that much sooner.
Aggregator Site – Cons
Survey aggregator sites usually pay less than originator sites do
Aggregators take their cut of the compensation offered by the originators. This means that aggregator sites pay you less for each survey. In principle, there is nothing wrong with that. They are in business to make a profit, after all, and they must also pay their hosting and other expenses. But it does mean that you will generally earn less per survey if you take it on an aggregator site.
The reward that you get on an aggregator site can be only slightly lower than what the originator site offers. Or it can take the bulk of the reward for itself leaving you with a fraction of the original amount. And if the survey is delivered through a router, or an offer wall, the reward you get is even lower. That’s because every additional link in the survey distribution chain represents an additional middleman that must be paid.
The worst case is if you access a survey through a router on an offer wall on an aggregator site. In this scenario, your compensation can be diluted as much as three times by various middlemen.
Different aggregator sites offer different reward amounts for the same surveys.
It looks like the operators of aggregator sites get to dictate how much of the reward on offer they get to keep, before leaving the rest for you.
This is why it pays to be selective about the sites that you choose to do surveys on. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to choose the best sites without the experience of having done many surveys yourself.
Luckily, we’ve done that hard work for you. Later on in this article you will find a list of the best survey sites for you to try out,
How Much Money Can You Make from Surveys?
How much money you can make depends on two main things. The first is the reward that each completed survey pays. The second is the frequency with which you receive survey offers.
How Much Do Online Surveys Pay?
The payment for a completed survey can be anything between $0.01 and $5.00, or more.
The vast majority of surveys will pay $1.00 or less. Those paying in the $2 to $3 range are fairly common. The availability of higher-reward surveys reduces as the reward increases.
You should never view a survey’s reward in isolation, though.
You probably will never want to do a survey that only pays $0.01. For most folks, the time and effort it would take is simply not worth the reward. Always weigh up what the survey is paying, against the time it is likely to take you to finish it.
There is no fixed formula for this. What is good for you will depend on your own circumstances and needs. I suggest surveys that pay a minimum of $0.40 and take less than 20 minutes to complete. Use this as a starting point and adjust the figures as you see fit.
These limits should always be flexible, though. I mean, if you are offered a survey that pays $5, would it really matter if it takes 35 minutes to do?
How Frequently Are Surveys Offered?
How often you will get a survey to complete depends on a few things:
The general availability of surveys.
If the need for information-gathering increases, there will be a similar increase in the number of surveys in circulation.
For example, the Covid-19 pandemic created just such a situation in 2020. Institutions like businesses needed to understand how citizens were dealing with the impact that the pandemic had on their lives.
Many of them used paid surveys to gather this information. Survey-takers experienced a surge of new surveys and received a small windfall as they benefited from the extra income.
Your particular demographic.
Almost all surveys target specific audiences. They may focus on certain genders, age-ranges, education levels, income groups or a combination of these factors. These demographics determine whether you are offered a certain survey or not.
If you want to get more paid survey offers there is not much that you can do about your demographic. I mean, you can’t change your age or gender, for example. But, there are a few factors that you should know about and that could result in getting more survey opportunities.
We’re not saying that you should be dishonest when responding to survey screenings; quite the opposite in fact. But, survey sites usually allow only one member per household. So it makes sense to identify the person in your home that’s likely to receive the most opportunities.
Here are just a few of the most common things that can improve your chances:
- You are the primary shopper for groceries in your household. It also helps if you and your spouse or partner are jointly responsible for this.
- You have children that live in your household. Usually, only children under 18 years of age count.
- You own a motor vehicle. Alternatively, you are in the market to buy one and participate in decisions that relate to it.
- You are a decision-maker in your company. You have authority to make procurement or spending decisions. Even if you don’t have the final say, being able to influence these decisions improves your chances.
- You drink alcohol. Companies like to know what your favorite drinks are. They are keen to understand how you enjoy them, where you drink and what you like about your favorite beverages.
- You smoke or vape.
- You perform IT-related functions in your company. IT companies like to know how businesses use IT products.
How to Choose a Paid Survey Site
I recommend that you follow a few simple decision-making steps when you choose a paid survey website.
Survey Originator or Survey Aggregator?
If you decide to only use originator sites then you should join as many as you can. That way you will be offered a high number of unique surveys. You will also receive the highest possible compensation for a particular survey.
You will lose out on surveys from originators who don’t have their own websites. They rely on aggregators to distribute their surveys.
Get ready to manage multiple websites and to work towards reaching high payment thresholds. Then be prepared to wait several weeks for your payments to be processed.
Should you decide to use aggregators instead, we recommend you use only one site of your choice. Two if you really have to have more, but no more than that.
Choose How You Want To Be Paid
One of the best things about paid online surveys is that you often get to choose how you get paid. There are three main options:
Get Paid In Cash
If you want to be paid in cash for your surveys you must choose a survey site that pays cash rewards. Fortunately, most of them do.
You must also have a way to receive cash payments.
The most common payment method is through PayPal. Almost all survey sites have the ability to make payments through PayPal. PayPal is available in many countries. It is simple to use and, in most cases, it’s the most convenient method to receive your money.
If you don’t already have a PayPal account, you can open one here. Make sure that PayPal is available in your country before you start completing surveys. If you don’t, you might be unable to receive any money that you earned.
Check if the survey site deducts PayPal’s fees from your earnings when they pay you out. These fees can eat up a few percent of your earnings. Other sites do not deduct fees and the earnings that you see are the earnings that you receive. We prefer the latter.
If PayPal is not an option for you then consider Payoneer. It is a good alternative, but it is not available on as many survey sites.
Get Paid With Vouchers Or Gift Cards
Instead of receiving cash you could choose to receive vouchers instead. These could be for physical goods or digital products. Amazon vouchers are probably the most common but some sites also offer vouchers that you can redeem on Steam or other sites offering digital goods.
Choose a survey site that offers vouchers for products and services that you actually want. Imagine spending hours working on surveys only to find that you’re not really interested in any of the vouchers being offered as rewards.
Get Paid With Bitcoin Or Other Cryptocurrencies
A very few sites offer the ability to receive cryptocurrency as payment. Those that do, almost exclusively offer Bitcoin only, so you don’t get much of a choice of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin transaction fees can greatly diminish your earnings if you cash out small amounts at a time. For this reason, there is a tendency for high minimum payment thresholds on websites that offer payments using Bitcoin.
Is The Paid Survey Website Represented In Your Country?
If you want vouchers for physical products, check that the stores offering them are represented in your own country. If not, you could incur international shipping and importing fees when you buy goods using the vouchers that you earn.
To avoid these problems you could choose a survey site that is represented in your country. For example, Toluna has a presence in several countries and usually offers vouchers from stores located within those countries.
The choice of country does not matter too much if you want cash payments and you can use PayPal. If that’s not the case, you want a site that can pay you from within your own country. These payments can by by check or by direct deposit. This will help eliminate expensive international payment fees.
How Long Before You Get Paid?
Once you have earned some money you will want to get it into your hands as soon as possible. There’s not much worse than earning some cash and then having to wait weeks before you get it.
To do this, select paid survey websites with low minimum payment thresholds and the shortest processing times.
In our opinion, $5.00 to $10.00 is a reasonable amount to earn before before you can get paid. We also see no good reason why you should wait longer than 48 to 72 hours for your payout to be processed.
Does The Site Have Lots Of Surveys?
Choose a site that offers a wide selection of surveys directly, not through an offer wall or router.
Paid survey sites are not all created equal and some offer many more surveys than others.
We’ve already mentioned that aggregator sites are much more likely to offer surveys in greater numbers than originator sites. But, even among aggregator sites, there are often big differences in survey volumes. It’s a good idea to shop around before committing to a site.
More is not always best though. Look for paid survey sites that try to reduce your workload as much as possible.
For example, a site like SuperPay.me has many more surveys and survey routers than any other website that we know of. But, you need to repeatedly go into menu after menu just to see if there are surveys for you. That’s great if you have lots and lots of time.
Take a look at the screenshot above to see what we mean. The site almost works like a giant survey router.
Contrast this with the nice clean interface that ySense has. There is no doubt that there are exactly 4 survey possibilities for you. What’s more, you can immediately see what each survey pays and the time each one requires.
It is still possible for any of these surveys to screen you out, but at least you didn’t waste any time finding them.
Our Recommendations
Here we give you our thoughts on what the best sites are to do surveys on.
Best Survey Aggregator Website
In our view, this has to be ySense. It has a good selection of surveys from multiple originators and pays a good deal better than most other sites. Read our full review of ySense.
ySense has a fairly low payout threshold. Depending on the payment method you choose it can be as low as $3.00. You need to have $10.00 to cash out using PayPal. Payment methods also include Amazon vouchers, Skrill and Payoneer.
In our experience, payments are usually processed within 1 or 2 days.
If ySense doesn’t tickle your fancy, a good alternative is PrizeRebel.
Best Survey Originator Website
Our vote goes to Toluna.
As a survey originator, Toluna has a lot going for it. It has a presence in several countries and rewards are often country-specific. Toluna sites encourage a sense of community.
It’s surveys are reasonably well-rewarded. It even has single-question mini surveys which take seconds to complete and are worth a few points.
Like most originator sites, payments can take several weeks to process. Having said that, Toluna is a reputable site that has been operating reliably for years.
Conclusion
I hope that I managed to teach you something useful about paid online surveys. If you feel that I left something out then let me know and I might include it in a future update. Have fun making some easy money.
You can certainly make a little money with surveys. But it often feels like it requires so much time for the little bit that you can make.
There is a much better way to make money online. A way that rewards you far better for your time and effort. And best of all, it’s easy to understand and to do.
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