How it works: Pinecone Research is owned and operated by Nielsen, the billion-dollar data and measurement company responsible for TV Nielsen Ratings. With Pinecone Research, you earn $3 per survey, which typically take 15 to 20 minutes to complete. The downside to Pinecone is that they often have strict demographic requirements, which means that you may not qualify depending on your age, education, race or other profile factors.
I signed up for InBox Dollars, which led to a rabbit hole of sweepstakes and surveys, all of which, had the same 30 questions repeated 2-3 times in a single survey, punctuated by attempts at selling magazine subscriptions. One survey had a couple of telling questions. “Do you believe Trump is the best President America has ever had?” “Do you believe Hillary Clinton should be convicted of a crime?” and “Is Fox your main source of news?” I started getting an ungodly amount of spam emails and I can’t even count the number of spam calls, that are now growing at a rate of about 18 per day. I can’t block them fast enough, though one number has called 21 times in the past 3 days. 11 of those tries were yesterday. Today they only called 5 times… I just started mass spam dumping from my inbox. I don’t even care what’s in the message. If it’s not something I know. DELETE DELETE DELETE! I received a Netspend card in the mail today. Wasn’t able to activate it though.
In a few cases, InboxDollars directed me to “exclusive offers” instead of straightforward surveys. One required me to give my name, address, phone number and birthdate to earn money and enter a sweepstakes for a Target gift card. Another time, I was prompted to give my email address and choose between Coke and Pepsi in exchange for $1 and a sweepstakes entry. I didn’t want to give my contact information to what appeared to be third-party sites, so I clicked out of these promotions.