Interesting read, thanks for sharing. I suppose that online surveys may generate a few extra dollars on the side for some people, but it does require you to qualify for certain surveys online. In many cases you may not qualify, and will result in having to search for more surveys. This can be time consuming and in most cases not as profitable as may be expected.
I’ve been a member of inboxpounds (UK version)for almost two years now and only managed to earn som £90 in four payments, most of it from paid offers like bingo and other rubbish. I have to admit their surveys sucks, not only being potentially low paid, but also due to extremely low possibility of qualifying to get paid. And than you have to double check what you do, I just got one completed a couple of weeks back, spend some 40mins on it as it was promised to pay £2.00, got qualified and than I only got paid £0.20 a couple of days later. Also they don’t seem to pay for radio loyalty captchas any more.
According to the company’s own website, it has millions of active members using the website. Since 2006, it has paid over $25 million to members and counting through its subsidiary SendEarnings (launched in 2005). Profits and expansion have occurred in every year since inception with the company branching out to the UK with its InboxPounds service in 2012. Today it has over 30 employees.
IOCS is a not-for-profit research organization that conducts studies and experiments on shopping-related behavior – things like how we, as consumers, evaluate products, how we make the buying decisions, etc. Although the focus is mostly on shopping related behavior, some of their experiments and studies include broader areas of marketing, psychology, and economics.
When brands want to find out what consumers think about their product and services, they turn to market research companies. Market research companies are the ones actually administering the surveys on behalf of the corporations looking for data/feedback. Think of online surveys as a type of focus group, except in this case, everything is done online.