Saturday, April 20, 2013

Surveyhead Changes to iPoll


They’ve been telling members for several months that a change would be coming and now it has happened. Surveyhead is now iPoll.

It doesn’t appear as though much has changed with the new iPoll survey site, although I said several weeks ago I was leery of any changes because in my experience such changes rarely go well – for survey takers, that is. While the web site looks different, it operates pretty much the same. Oh, there have been and continue to be a few glitches – such as the site opening a non-functional window on top of itself in which the surveys are purportedly supposed to open but never do – but hopefully those things will get straightened out.

Surveyhead and Focusline have been among the most reliable of survey sites, regularly offering surveys and making it easy to accumulate rewards. Both sites are owned and operated by the same company, gozing, and it was never quite clear why they operated two sites that were the same and usually offered the exact same surveys. I don’t know if the transfer of Surveyhead to iPoll is the first step in folding Focusline into iPoll as well, but we’ll know soon enough.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Valued Opinions Makes It Harder To Earn Rewards


Taking online surveys is not going to make you rich. But, from time to time the companies that sponsor online surveys make it even harder to earn a few measly rewards.
Valued Opinions, a survey site owned and operated by Researchnow.com, has just announced it is upping the level at which you are able to cash out your winnings. In an email announcement to members, Valued Opinion says its cost for Amazon.com vouchers (the primary method you are able to earn rewards) has gone up and therefore it is increasing the cash out minimum from $20 to $22.
How valid is this? Valued Opinions says it’s because the cost of purchasing Amazon gift cards has gone up. Don’t believe it. The cost of $1 in Amazon gifts still is … well, $1. Valued Opinions isn’t charged any more for buying gift cards than you or I would be. If they are, they’re doing it all wrong. This is just another way in which survey companies make more money by paying their members less. But, that’s nothing new.

Other Sites Boost Their Minimum Payout Level

The bigger issue here is that the rewards system for doing online surveys has always been very meager. Valued Opinions has been fairly miserly in their rewards system from the get go. You won’t get many invitations to their surveys and when you do the odds for not being able to complete the survey is very high. Plus, the rewards for even the surveys you complete are small and very, very slow to accumulate. It’s usually several months of diligently working on their surveys that I’m able to even get close to their cash out limit.
Sadly, Valued Opinions is not the first, nor the last online site to boost their minimum payments. As I always say, if you’re doing online surveys don’t think for a minute you’re going to be making a lot of money. Cumulatively, if you stick to the major online sites like Mechanical Turk, Toluna, Opinion Outpost, Surveyhead, and the like you can pull down several hundred a month – but you’ll have to devote several hours a day to the task in order to reach this level.