Current Rankings, from largest to smallest (as of October 5, 2008)
Paid Survey Reviews of 20 Top Paid Survey Sites, by Size
Based on their clients' ratings of them as expressed in their refund rates.
Which Paid Survey Membership Site is Best? Here is what their clients are telling us about which ones made money for Them!
Here's where we line 'em up and let 'em compete!
You can see all of the top 20 paid survey sites here (plus a few in the 'Penalty Box'!)
Pick any one of the top 3-5, sign up with them, join their happy clients and make money!
The paid survey review list below shows the largest company (the one with the highest "gravity") at the top. It is sorted down, in order, with the smallest paid survey site at the bottom of the list. To see the sort by RANKING, click here: Analysis & Current Recommendations
Our selection and Current Ranking of our top 5 choices are in the next-to-the-last column on the right.
Explanations:
The single most important ranking factor is the refund rate history. We use and show three numbers for this, each in per cent (%):
The 3-month moving average.
The refund rate for the last 2 weeks.
The Composite Index, which is composed of 60% of the current refund rate plus 40% of the 3-month moving average. This is the one to watch.
The Composite Index is like a golf score; the lower, the better! -- And it tells you how well (or how poorly!) the player is doing!
Please note: 1. As of May 1, 2007 we are updating these rankings twice monthly, on the 5th and the 21st of each month. 2. To better understand the comparisons, please read the explanations of the different factors used, in the "Explanation of Classifying Factors" and the "Commentary", below. 3. See especially the discussion of the 3-month moving average refund category, and the Composite Index!
Analysis and Current Rankings, by Size:
Refund Rates in Per Cent (%)
Paid Survey Guide Company:
Cost to Join
Grav- ity
3 mo. Avg
Last 1/2 Mo.
Com- pos- ite Index
Oct. 5th Rank- ing
Click To Visit Site
Paid Surveys Etc.- Site has a personal feel. Many testimonials, less slick, less hype... perhaps more real? Recently updated. Historically, has a low refund rate, has often been the leader or amongst the top 5.
Make Money Taking Surveys -They say, "Companies are spending $41 billion annually to do market research. They need the opinions of regular consumers like you to decide if a product is worth their time and money. These companies now realize that telemarketing doesn’t work-they can’t get your opinions for free. So they are prepared to pay you for them-and pay well.!"
Paid Surveys Online - This very active site offers an instant $20.00 survey that you can take upon signing up and offset your cost of joining. Attractive site with a lot to offer.
Express Paid Surveys - Slick new website, sample survey. Not much info. FAQ's explain the paid survey business. They have often been amongst the top five.
Highest Pay Surveys - Sample survey, bonuses, six good testimonials."$10 - $300 Per Online Survey, $50 - $300 Per Hour For Online Focus Groups, $4 - $25 Per Hour For Previewing Movie Trailers. Market research companies will pay you for answering simple online surveys and participating in online focus groups. Why? To get the honest opinions of consumers to help them figure out which new products are likely to succeed. It's really just that simple."
Maximum Paid Surveys - 500+ paid online survey companies, 200+ mystery shopping companies. They now say they have 762 companies that want to pay for your opinion.
Quick Paid Surveys - Step by step startup instructions, 490 companies in their database, updated weekly. They say they have a clean database, no trash companies.
Surveyhawk - U.K.company (Located inside the European Union) offers great coverage of surveys available in Europe, provides software to auto-fill signup forms. (Join price is actually £18.)
Instant Paid Surveys -Informative website. Access To 500 + Specialized Firms that will give you cash, products, and prizes on behalf of their business clients. Also offer Product Study Forums
Survey Storage -They offer a comfortable way to earn money using your PC and the Internet. They offer an easy way to earn money at home, or (anywhere), wherever you have access to the Internet. They offer to send you detailed info about their database, about earnings and about companies they list.
Encuestas Por Dinero (Surveys for Money)- They say/Ellos dicen: "Encuestas Pagadas En Español. Encuestas En Español Es Un Mercado Que Aun Está Virgen (sin mucho participantes). Paid Surveys In Spanish Is An Unexploited Market." [Note: We don't know exactly how to classify this one! It deals with surveys directed at the 41 million people in the U.S. who speak Spanish. If you speak Spanish you might want to check it out!]
Net Paid Surveys -Market Research Companies need your opinions. They pay thousands of dollars every day to people like you. Sooner or later you will want to do surveys because it's easy, fun and you can be rewarded for your efforts. Offers phone surveys, focus groups, paid to watch new movie trailers.
Survey City -Over 550 guaranteed paying survey companies. Includes Getting Paid to Drive your car with magnetic or vinyl ads on it or a new or existing car package, Mystery Shopping package with 120+ nationally paying companies.
Extreme Paid Surveys - Top Features and Benefits: Take surveys, make $5-$75 an hour, Read emails for $10-$40 an hour, Join focus groups and get $50-$150. Try new products, and keep them. Preview movies, $4-$25 an hour.
Top Dollar Surveys - Earn money from your home, Set your own hours and your own pay. Enjoy what you do. Get paid up to $75 to take online surveys, up to $150 to participate in online focus groups. Get paid to try new products and you get to keep the products too, Get paid up to $25 to preview movie trailers!
In Ice Hockey, when players break the rules and mis-behave the officials take them out of the game and put them in the penalty box. The game then goes on without their participation. They can only watch and wait until it is O.K to come out of the penalty box and get back in the game.
Some paid survey sites we have been following now have Composite Refund Indexes of over 15%! That's such a bad paid survey review that it's a bit ridiculous! Another, Paid Survey Program, has not filed their reports with ClickBank so we cannot calculate their refund rate. (Any site that hides their refund data is most likely NOT proud of it! We equate "Unknown" with "High" and don't allow any such to remain on the active list.)
So we built the "penalty box" below and put them into it, "out of play" and away from the rest, until they get their acts together. ;-)
***PENALTY BOX***
Refund Rates in Per Cent (%)
Paid Survey Guide Company:
Cost to Join
Grav- ity
3 mo. Avg
Last 2 wks
Com- pos- ite Index
Sept 21st Rank- ing
Click To Visit Site
Survey Scout - This very active site is very highly rated by various rating agencies. Still, the refund numbers show that 1 out of every 5.3 clients demands a refund! We do not recommend this site at this time.
GreatNetMoney -Advocates their Great NET Money Program, where you Get PAID for taking surveys. They say they help common people earn an uncommon income from all around the planet.
At one time, size was a major factor in choosing good paid survey sites. Bigger was better. Then for a few months the refund rates of many larger sites went up and stayed up. Big paid survey sites were starting to look like dinosaurs, big, but slow to adapt to new conditions! Many of the smaller, innovative sites have got much better marks from their clients, as expressed in their refund rates.
But recently the larger sites have made a comeback, rising to the top in results according to their clients and as expressed in their refund rates.
Some sites have "gone private", using ClickBank only for a collection agent, which makes their full refund rate figures unavailable to the public (you and I!). Instead of making the changes needed to provide more client satisfaction, they took steps to hide the size of their failures to please their clients! We no longer list any sites that have gone this route.
In September of 2007 we set up a "Penalty Box". We put sites with refund rates over 15% in it. These sites with ridiculously high refund rates do not deserve to be in our top 20, regardless of their size!
We also brought some of the smaller paid survey sites that we have been tracking, into the top 20 list. They are smaller but have very good refund rate numbers. We prefer a small paid survey site with a 5% refund rate to a large site whose refund rate is over 10%!!
Recent Changes:
Average Refund Rates in the Past
Date
Avg.
Oct. 5
7.02%
Sept. 21
7.21%
Sept. 5
7.35%
Aug. 21
7.92%
Aug. 5
7.49%
July 21
7.15%
July 5
7.36%
June 21
8.54%
June 5
7.49%
May 21
8.01%
May 5
7.18%
April 21
6.84%
April 5
6.68%
March 21
6.51%
March 5
6.68%
Feb 21
6.49%
Feb 5
6.85%
Jan 21
8.64%
Jan 5.'08
8.26%
Dec 21
8.64%
Dec 5
9.42%
Nov 21
8.13%
Nov 5
8.66%
Oct 21
8.30%
Oct 5
9.92%
Sept 21
9.92%
Sept 5
10.16%
Aug 21
9.82%
Aug 5
8.28%
July 21
8.84%
July 5
8.55%
Jun 21
8.87%
Jun 5,'07
7.34%
This time our two first place winners from last time finished 1 and 2. Paid Surveys Etc. is in 1st place and Paid Surveys Online took 2nd place.
Surveys Needed, whose gravity index dropped below 1.0, has been replaced by Make Money Taking Surveys, a larger, newly available site with gravity (size) measurement of over 100.
Also, we have added a specialty site, "Encuestas Por Dinero" (Surveys for Money). This site is setup for Spanish-speaking people who live in the U.S. It deals with surveys being made of/for the 41 million-person Hispanic demographic. It has a good ranking, but was not compared directly with the sites in English. Instead, we just mentioned it here and gave it an "HM" ranking, for Honorable Mention.
Refund rates are down a bit for this half-month period. The average refund rate for the latest half-month period for our top 20 paid survey sites was 7.21%.
You will note that we now show the past average refund rates in a table by date, which you can see on the right-hand side of this text.
ClickBank earlier made some changes in the way it reports numbers which may cause some distortion in the absolute values this half month. It will not affect the relative positions of the sites evaluated.
When we have sites whose numbers are in transition from changes in prices or otherwise off-scale and not reliable, we indicate this by "n/a" (Not Available right now).
Note that none of our picks had either a 2 week or a Composite Index refund rate higher than 7.14% (1 client in 14). All things being equal we felt that the refund rate was the single most important measure of client satisfaction and determiner of the quality of their service. We tend to favor larger companies over smaller ones, based on the market's choice and greater stability.
We now print the refund rates of all with refund rates of 10% or higher, of our top 20 in Red above. This is to highlight their low desirability status and urge caution with these. Note that we have added a red "X" to the left of each of these, to point out that these rank at the bottom of the top 20 and their refund rates have passed our "red line" danger mark. At this time we would NOT recommend them.
The overall average refund rate this month is7.02%.
We have looked at the numbers of survey makers on the lists of paid survey sites as a possible qualifying factor, but have generally downplayed this number. The quality of the list is much more important than the shear number of names that are on it.
We now update our analyses twice a month, at which time we review and revise our picks. Paid survey companies change and market conditions change. Our selection of recommended companies is dynamic and will change as new information comes in. We always pick the current best choices for you!
We now have fifteen months of history posted on this website, with the numbers and the picks from December 5, 2006 all the way up to today. We invite you to look at the past numbers in Past Rankings for comparisons.
In general, you probably won't go wrong with any of the companies listed, especially those with refund rates below the average. For the 20 companies listed above the current refund average is 7.02% (means that on average, for the top 20 companies shown here, approximately 1 new member in every 14.2 asked for a refund for one reason or another). For the top five only 1 in 19.7 to 1 in16.1 asked for a refund.
**Remember that the services offered by each and every one of the above companies are covered by an unconditional money-back guarantee, backed up by ClickBank! **
The 3-month moving average.
Paid Surveys Etc.- Site has a personal feel. Many testimonials, less slick, less hype... perhaps more real? Recently updated. Historically, has a low refund rate, has often been the leader or amongst the top 5.
Survey Scout - This very active site is very highly rated by various rating agencies. Still, the refund numbers show that 1 out of every 5.3 clients demands a refund! We do not recommend this site at this time.
