I Did Online Surveys So You Don't Have To

A lot of people search for ways to make money online and the first thing they see is people telling them to do surveys. Surveys reward people with cash or gift cards for answering questions about topics. Usually, it’s about a person’s shopping habits or things they like to do. People love to share their opinions with others and to get rewarded for it is even better. Yet, the question to consider in all this - is it worth it? I made it my goal to find out.

Let’s be frank, I’m one of those people who searched for ways to make money online. I was looking for something to make a little extra on the side. Thus, I searched and found a bunch of sites that had surveys. I wanted something that I could do in my spare time without hassle and monetary investment. Little did I know what was to come.

I signed up for every single survey site that popped up in the search. They lured me in with the promise of earning $5 per survey. I was ecstatic. $5 for answering questions about my shopping habits; I’m sold. In my head, I started calculating the number of surveys it would take for me to earn $100 a month. I was ready to make money but I ran into a problem. In fact, those $5 surveys were nowhere in sight.

The surveys I saw valued for 10 cents, 25 cents, 30 cents; Not $5. After seeing that, I should have been wiser and moved on to more fruitful opportunities but I stayed. The grass isn’t always greener, am I right? After all, surveys are simple tasks to complete. So, I dedicated my precious time to complete as many surveys as I could. Turns out it’s not so simple.

The creators of the survey look for specific people. If you don’t fit into their category, you will disqualify and you will not earn your cents. This happened to me more times than I could count. If I was earning money based on the number of times I disqualified, I would’ve been making a six figure salary. The worst part is that some of them wait until you’re almost finished and then disqualify you. Again, you won’t get the money, even if you spent the last 20 minutes filling out their questions. The only thing you earn is frustration and time wasted.

It wasn’t all frustration and disqualification. Some of the surveys were only 5 minutes and paid 50 cents. Now that’s a step up from 10 cents. To add icing on the cake, all I had to do was watch ads for those 5 minutes. This is something I already do every day, only I don’t get paid for it. Still, the rewards gained were not worth the effort put in.

The realization that my time would be better spent doing something else hit me. I moved on to better things, watching videos for money. Some of the survey sites allowed users to watch videos to earn money. I would have to watch at least 20 videos to earn 1 cent. This wasn’t too bad because I could have the videos playing in the background and forget about it. This usually earned me about 30 cents a day. I went back to doing surveys on top of watching videos and I would earn about $25 a month. To summarize, this was a complete disaster.

The moral of the story is your time would be better spent doing something else. Unless (Don’t do it) you enjoy answering questions and want some sort of compensation even if it is only 10 cents. But if an extra $25 a month is something you want for yourself, I recommend using Swagbucks. It’s where I earned most of the money and it’s by far the easiest to use. I’ll leave it up for you to decide.