Can You Actually Make Money Online with Surveys? — A 30 Day Experiment
My honest review of using Respondent.io which is a website that pays you for attending online surveys.
There are many Get-Rich-Fast schemes online and there are tons of side hustles you can try.
One of the more frequently suggested ways to earn extra money is by taking surveys online. I gave it a shot a few years ago, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out at all. I only made a few cents so that try was not very successful back then. When I read about Respondent.io on Medium I wanted to give it another chance.
Respondent.io (partner link) is an online platform that connects researchers with participants for market research studies, focus groups, and other types of surveys. So, researchers can find the right participants with the platform and participants can make money by participating in these studies.
The website sounded promising to me so I thought, why not let’s try it for 30 days and see what happens?
The 30 Days of Trial and Error
The first thing to do was to sign up. That was easy.
As the website is more directed towards professionals they were also asking about my work e-mail address. I was not comfortable adding that but signing up still worked. They are showing you even more studies if you add your professional e-mail address.
The next steps are to confirm your e-mail address and add your PayPal link so you can get paid and then you are ready to go.
After you have done that you can start by applying for projects by using “screeners”. In the beginning, you have three of them so I was able to apply for three different projects and waited for what happened.
On Day 1, that was it. Nothing more happened, or so I thought so.
Later that night I received the first confirmation e-mail that I could attend an online survey for 20$. The survey did not last more than 10 minutes and was straightforward. I received a code that I had to send to Respondent.io which confirmed my participation.
And it actually worked. After a few days I received 19$ on my Paypal account and that was for maybe 15 minutes of my time. (There was a 1$ fee for the platform).
On Day 2 my screeners were “filled up” again so I wanted to apply for three other projects, but in the end, I only applied for two. The reason? I did not want to scan my private ID, log in to my banking account, or have a 120-minute interview for 30$.
There were also some studies that did not seem legit so I did not apply to these studies. One example was a study seeking “Internet Users Worldwide” for 800$ using their website for 30 minutes (with a lot of grammar mistakes in the description).
Over the next few days, nothing really new came in and I only applied for another study here and there.
What I quickly found out was that I did not want to just take on any study and earn 10$ for 2 hours of my time. I only wanted to do the interviews or surveys that actually interested me or had at least a good time/money ratio.
My experience was that many studies are only relevant to a very small set of people, and this is also the reason why Respondent pays a little bit better than other websites. Not everyone is a supply chain professional involved in sustainability data reports or a marketing expert who uses mobile wallets as a marketing channel.
So over the thirty days, I applied for a lot of other studies but most did not really fit my profile so I ended up at the end of my 30 days to earn exactly 19$ with the study I participated in on my first day.
You can probably earn way more if you really spend the time or even cheat but I think it is just not what I like to spend my time with.
I think in the future I will check the Respondent.io side here and there and see if anything interesting will pop up, but for me, it is probably not a thing that I will do often. But if the study fits your profile it is definitely a good way to make some extra money.
If you would also like to try Respondent.io, they have a referral program so you can support me if you sign-up using that link. I am curious about what your experience will be with the platform so please let me know if you have tried it.
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