Monday, February 25, 2013

Changes coming to Surveyhead

One of the most popular and well paying survey sites, Surveyhead, is announcing that it is converting to something called iPoll. The message you receive when you go to the Surveyhead sites is as follows: "A few months ago Surveyhead launched the iPoll mobile app. Launching a product we put so much care and effort into was a special time for us and the abundance of positive feedback from the community has been truly moving. For us, this reinforces the success of iPoll and sets a clear path for the future. Over the next few weeks we will be rebranding Surveyhead to iPoll and saying goodbye to the Surveyhead brand."
The popup window gives you to options: "Tell Me More" or "Remind Me Later." Having experienced these kinds of switchovers before - sometimes you get switched to something terrible (For example, what Toluna tried to do recently) - I'm not going to do anything until more information is available. For now, clicking on Remind Me Later takes me to the existing Surveyhead site where I can take the surveys as usual.
I'm advising a little caution here until more details are published and you can determine what to do having the benefit of more complete disclosure. After all, why do anything unless you have to? As the old saying does - if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Hotspex Not So Hot

There are several websites that review survey sites and several have touted Hotspex (hotspex.com) as one of the best in terms of rewards, number of surveys, etc.
Some time ago I joined Hotspex hoping that it would provide a meaningful, enjoyable and lucrative survey taking experience. Sadly, that's not the case.
I can probably count the fingers on one hand and come up with a higher number than the number of surveys Hotspex has invited to me to take. Indeed, it has taken me a lot longer to fill out the Hotspex profiles than it has taken to fill out all the surveys that Hotspex has sent me.
Hotspex pays out in what they call "BUX," but it's much the same as every other site. You earn "BUX" which you can transfer into cash. Unfortunately, it'll take you a month of Sundays before you'll ever earn enough to cash in.
All of this should come as no great surprise. Hotspex is actually - like many other survey sites - the marketing arm of a commercial research site. However, unlike other such companies that actually offer surveys to take, Hotspex does not.
So, I'll keep it around in the off chance that I'll eventually earn a buck or two before I'm too old to use the money. But, on the whole I'd say Hotspex isn't very hot and isn't worthy spending any time with at all.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Survey Sites Getting Tougher

Survey sites continue to seek out new ways of eliminating computer-generated programs that try to whiz through surveys in order to collect rewards and cash. While I don't have any statistics on how serious a problem this is, the survey sites continue to generate new ways to foil the scammers.
Recently some of the new methods being employed have included asking survey takers to solve math problems (such as how much is 2 + 2), confirming that the month of February follows January, or that Tuesday follows Monday. A more recent iteration of this kind of effort has you picking the backward spelling of a given word.
While human survey takers will find all these easy, if not a little time consuming, hoops to jump through you wonder if they'll really thwart the wrong doers. You also have to wonder why the scammers would even bother with the pittance that comes from taking surveys - even a large number of surveys. Just the same, the survey companies see it as a serious problem. While there's not much we human survey takers can do about this, it is to our advantage that the scammers be stopped if only to make it less cumbersome for us honest survey takers.