The Truth about Online Paid Surveys

I suppose there are some truths or realities about the online paid survey industry that most people don’t know about. What I’ll try to do is explain the intricacies of the online paid survey industry to you so that you can get a better picture of what is going on and why most people new to the survey industry will ultimately get conned if they don’t do enough research on the industry before joining.

The very first thing that has to be said is that the online paid industry is not a scam and the industry is very well and alive growing very steadily. The problem is that many newbies get conned when they sign up with the wrong company and then dismiss the whole paid survey as a con job. The fact that these newbies got conned is because they didn’t do enough due diligence and research on the company that they signed up to do the survey for and was either too “greedy” or eager to get started that they totally didn’t do any background research and hoped for the best. It is almost they are setting themselves up for a fall then blaming everyone when they do.

The problem is that most people don’t understand the survey industry and thus are quite gullible to how the process works. There are generally only 4-5 big boys in the industry who send out surveys by the thousands almost everyday. These companies act as statistics crunchers and will never approach people to sign up. Rather they will buy this survey information from other smaller companies who will then deal with the end user.
These smaller survey information intermediaries are the companies that you and me will sign-up to participate in.

The unfortunate thing about the way this industry is set-up is that although the big boys that do the info crunching will always get their data and pay the smaller companies for their help, the survey participant simple isn’t guaranteed to be paid by the smaller survey companies that service the survey participants. In fact, a leading internet marketing magazine once quoted that as many as 80% of all the survey providers don’t actually pay their participants. This means only 20% of the companies serving survey participants actually pay money out. This is a terrible statistic that will inevitably cripple the online paid survey industry if it continues

This is why there is an emergence of survey rating companies which are set up to combat this level of scamming and blatant fraud. The companies will rate each survey provider according to a matrix of different performance indicators but most importantly will filter out survey providers that don’t pay their survey participants. Two particularly good agencies that I have used before are xxx and yyy which give very up-to-date information and have a wide number of matrixes which they use to evaluate the survey companies.

All up the truth about the online paid survey industry is that although it is based on an imperfect model which is wide open to scammers and fraud, there are ways around it which you can use to join the market with little to no risk. One just has to be careful with which survey company they sign up with.