Earning money in life is difficult, everybody knows of that and it is the same on Internet as well. But people who don’t have any idea of how Internet works and doesn’t have the basic knowledge of Internet tend to think that earning money on Internet is rather easy than the available jobs and businesses in the outside world. This is not any presumption, talk to some people on the road, who knows nothing about Internet, but has heard of it and you’d know the facts for yourself. I also thought on similar lines before taking the plunge myself. Statistics suggest that 97 percent of the netizens fail to make money online and only 3 percent succeed to do so. If this info is correct, then it’s staggering! I can’t assure of the exactitude of this statistics available for anybody to see, but I’ve seen people slog it out for hours, just for a few cents! It riles me that people stick out with sites that pay less than we pay beggars on the street! But then they can count them fortunate, because begging for a few cents seem to be more profitable than losing big chunks of money to the endless belly of an unscrupulous filthy scammer! The best way of earning on the Internet is by scamming people, you agree or not, it is the fact. People act with impunity, ambushing in the dark alleys of a virtual world in camouflage and it is very difficult to comb them out of their cosy cheat dens. Only if that scoundrel has done something to stir up the authorities, then he or she would land up in trouble, else they can yawn on their sofa and have booze while counting the bucks that were produced by our endless toil! Barring those forgettable fellows, lots of other people make money on the Internet, but it requires some kind of special skills, for example, I see web designing and quality article writing (by quality I meant something of the highest class and very much in demand of) a very much prolific way of earning on Internet. For the non-skilled or not-so-skilled persons, there are opportunities certainly, as not all sites are fraudulent ones, but those earnings won’t generally make your ends meet and you’d have to cling on to your day job or business to earn your bread.
Among the opportunities of earning online that is available for the average, attending surveys in a good option, but caution needs to be exercised here as well and I’d tell you why as you read on. Many Companies want to know what their buyers or intending buyers perceive about their products and what kind of improvements or ad campaigning would make them leave their competitors behind. To get such feedbacks from a section of the people that relates to their products and businesses they hire market research agencies to provide the data required against the required cost for the service provided. These market research agencies either on their own or in partnership with other small agencies and firms invite people from certain Countries or Worldwide to take voluntary surveys through their respective websites and provide honest and thoughtful answers to the questionnaires related to the products and services of the Company, who is seeking the data, for which they are duly rewarded. Since the costs of those are about a fraction of what these Companies spent on advertising in various media and is found to be very much informative, so more and more Companies are now engaging agencies and firms to carry out this service, as a result of which new firms and agencies are sprouting almost everyday to jump in this big pool. Since nationals of developed countries have greater purchasing power compared to the lesser-developed or under-developed ones on average, therefore it is quite natural that the cream of these rewards goes to inhabitants of those countries that are much in demand of. I remember about five to six years back there was hardly any site that would give rewards to International members, but now the field has opened up more than those times, yet the largest chunk of the booty goes to the elite club still.
Earlier, when there was no Internet, employees of these market research agencies used to approach people on roads or visit their homes to take surveys and it was not only inconvenient for all, but very much time-consuming as well and completely voluntary and non-rewarding mostly, but Internet seems to have solved this issue for once and all. Now people can attend the questionnaires at their convenient time and place and get rewards for those as well. Here I must add that all sites doesn’t pay rewards in cash or cheques in dollars or euros or some other currency, many sites pay their responders through gift vouchers or prepaid gift cards or in some other form that are redeemable on the sites they are meant for, to make online purchases of products available within the price range of the vouchers or prepaid gift cards. On the other hand the Companies are also satisfied with what they are getting against the amount they are paying for such a service. It appears to be a happy-happy situation for all, but it is far from it. Firstly there are lots of rogue Companies and secondly the middleman, those market research agencies and firms, may turn out to usurp the whole amount received without showing any appreciation for the hapless responder. That is the case and the scam bells start ringing to our peril. But that is not all, as I’ve found out these bunch of ruffians has ingenious ways of depriving us. Sadly these crooks has outnumbered the honest guys by some margin and therefore we should be extra-cautious, lest we waste away our valuable online time, which doesn’t come for free, for absolutely nothing! I’d be discussing some of such bitter experiences I had with these bunch of scum I’d like to forget and also of some rare good ones.
Before I start talking about various survey sites I’ve worked with I’d like to say that here I’m talking only about those sites where registration is free of cost. There are lots of other survey sites on the Internet that charge a fee for joining and then promise to give big buck paying surveys, but most of them are scams basically, yet people join them in the lure of money and get scammed eventually. I try to follow a rulebook of Internet, ‘Never pay somebody to get payment.’ So I don’t even want to talk about those sites at all. I will only talk about sites that are free to begin with and their good and bad sides that were revealed to me while working for quite some time with them. Also not every survey site accepts International members, rather the fat paying sites are only meant for responders from U.S.A., U.K., Canada, Australia and some other countries of the European Union. Things have changed much more than it was say five years ago, when there was hardly any site that would accept International members and particularly members from what they call, third World Countries. But now with the booming economies of Countries like India, China and Japan, more and more sites are accepting members from such Countries and International members as well. The sites therefore I would talk about in my article are only those that accepts International members.
A. W. Surveys
I am starting with a known scammer, as it was sadly my first stint with harsh reality on Internet! If you search Google you’d find loads of complaints against this particular site. This site uses one of the most warped and wiliest of ways to scam people. Their payout is 75$ and they pay via U.S. Postal Service or paypal or alertpay. It was several years back and I don’t remember the exact amount, but I received a few surveys promptly on joining and my account balance quickly jumped onto about 7$ or 8$ , I guess. They also had the option of giving 1.25$ per referral. Strangely after the first boom it was a complete lull. No Surveys at all and that was it. I found the same thing happening with some other complaints posted on Internet; I was not alone. It appears that as if you are supposed to add up the remaining amount of the required payout limit with referrals. But even if you add up, don’t expect to get paid, as the wicked ways would then start revealing in front of you. There are honest members whose accounts has been deleted just before payout without any prior warning and proper reason, members whose referrals has been rejected as fraudulent signups and their payment denied and many more as such. They pay once in a while though to make their site survive and if you are happen to figure in that exceedingly lucky list of people then only you’d get your money, else just forget it! Even some people claim to have complained to the cyber police and other online law enforcing agencies, but this Guy seems to have his connections in the right places. It feels very bad not only to see such a notorious site up and running with lots of traffic, but people even advertising for them in lots of places. We need to ban such sites totally and make them suffer for their misdeeds, but we are hardly united to do so. Thus new chickens appear everyday for slaying and the purloiner gets both the meat and the egg!
Ciao Surveys India
This is one of the two websites that has led me to write this article. If you search for this site on the Google you’d find many positive as well as negative reviews, just like any other site, but based on my own bitter experiences I had being an active member of this site I’d have to say that this is a ‘SCAM SITE’. I will explain clearly in no uncertain terms why I am expressing such extreme views about this particular site. This site gave me the first happiness, the happiness of seeing your account balance growing to the point of payout level and the first heartbreak of being scammed, which I’ve got used to by now. It was about one-and-a-half years ago and my memory is starting to fade away, but I’d never forget how I completed the surveys answering battery of questions honestly and painstakingly and was scammed in the end! This site is the Indian branch of the renowned Ciao Group that has been in this field of market research for a long time. Today I find that the site has changed and now is known as Toluna. Whatever may be the changes I’d still doubt about their honesty after my forgettable earlier experiences! This site used to pay and still do pay through Indiatimes Gift Vouchers and not cash, that are redeemable on the Indiatimes Shopping website, within the specified period mentioned in the vouchers. After completing many surveys with them perfectly and being rewarded in my account balance promptly I eventually reached the payout limit one day and requested for a payout. They informed me then that they are processing my Gift Vouchers and it’d take a few days to arrive. It arrived rightly after a few days and I went to the Indiatimes shopping site to buy some electronics goods with those vouchers. But during checkout every time I submitted the voucher numbers it was rejected as Invalid! So I contacted their helpdesk to solve my problem. They were prompt in replying and after a few email exchanges they instructed me that since the vouchers were invalid I should contact the Ciao Group and they won’t be able to do anything about it. It was understandable and I immediately contacted Ciao Surveys India with my problem. After sending innumerable help tickets I didn’t get any reply. After the due dates were over the vouchers expired and I left that site feeling totally cheated! After about a month or so came an arrogant reply from them, which basically stated, your complaint has been received and the matter is resolved. But the matter was far from being resolved as far as I was concerned and I was duped of my hard-earned money! I was not very much net savvy then compared to the present and had it happened now I’d have posted all over the Internet of how this site scams people and would have lodged complaints in every possible site that takes such complaints. I don’t know why they did this to me, as many people seem to have been paid from this site, as per their testimonies posted on several forums that can be viewed by Google search. But based on what I went through, which I’ve explained above to the best of my knowledge, I’d have to say that this is a scam site, that probably chooses its victims rather than doing it randomly and I’d not recommend this site to anyone. Work this site if you might at your own peril.
IndiaSpeaks.Net
This is the other site of the two websites I talked about earlier, which led me to write this piece. This is an Indian market research site that I’d best attribute as a rogue one! I’d explain here as well the reasons behind my disparaging opinions. I’m still a member of this site but I don’t attend their surveys anymore, as I am absolutely fed up with them. They have ingenious ways of denying you your due rewards, the one that I talked about in the beginning of this article. Nobody does what they do in the name of producing accurate market data. You do a survey with them, replying every answer the honest possible way and after few days find out that the survey has been rejected for unknown reasons! That can happen once in a while, but when it happens again and again and when you find that everybody else accepts your completed surveys then you are bound to feel cheated of your time and since time is money, so it can be very rightly termed ‘money’ as well. And what more, if you ask them the reasons behind the rejections, even after sending numerous emails you won’t get a single reply from them, as was the case with me. They will only send you invitations to new surveys to torment you further! If I’d been screened out early, I’d have accepted it as it is natural that I may not tally with the target group for whom the survey was primarily meant, but rejecting honestly answered and duly completed surveys one after another, time and again is unacceptable. I attempted so many surveys on their site or their partner’s sites; they accepted probably one and rejected many completed surveys. I feel like slapping these people upside down for their utterly abhorrent and snobbish misdemeanour. Once I thought that I’d bear with these rascals for a while till I reach the payout level and then withdraw the Gift vouchers, through which they make their payment and then forget this site for once and all, but I’m unable to bear this torment, so I’ve decided to kick away this site. I’ve worked with many other survey sites and whether you believe it or not, nobody has rejected a single one of my duly completed surveys except this site. So what else should I make of this bunch of disgusting people except feeling indignant about the treatment meted out to me! Here also I find that many people got paid from them; I guess they had been in one of their primary target groups to begin with and secondly they took it in their stride probably, but here is where we make huge mistakes, we need to teach these scoundrels some lesson, so that they don’t treat people like a bunch of beggars waiting eagerly to suffice with their sympathetic pittance when they feel like doing so! I repeat what I said about the earlier site, you work here at your own peril!
Corp Scan
This survey site is owned by the Corp Scan Group, which provides various solutions to the Companies of diverse sectors, including market research, project management, costing and valuation, etc. This site pays in cash and gifts as well and I believe does it honestly, from the look of things and more good news is that it does electronic transfers to your bank accounts in India if you provide the required codes like the MICR/IFSC codes and so far I haven’t seen any genuine complaints against them. I think electronic transfer is the best option, but there is the option of paypal as well for redeeming payments. For respective completed surveys they reward points; one point is equal to 20 INR and the rewarding of points generally vary from 3 to 20 and once you have accumulated 50 points, you can request for redemption from the available options. Though the more points you can accumulate the lesser would be the processing time for payments, according to the information provided on the site; for example, if you want to redeem more than 400 points, then the processing period will be one week, whereas when you want to redeem 50 points, it’d take four weeks of processing time. So larger is the amount of redemption, lesser would be the time required for the money to reach you. They also maintain a passbook of every member and you can allocate part of your rewards to be redeemed as cash and the rest as gifts, that would be delivered to your home or office; so this site has several options as far as payment is concerned and I’ve to admit that the options are one of the best! But there are problems with them of a different kind. All the surveys in their survey panel are not for Indians, there are surveys that target lots of other countries and some are for Indians with specified target groups. They do not have surveys for everybody, at least a few ones like most sites do. Their main target are people with some kind of technical or professional knowledge, like IT, Management, etc. or people from big cities possessing affluent items like cars, smartphones, airconditioners, etc. I wonder sometimes why would those affluent people take such surveys for a few thousand bucks a month, when they tread on lakhs and crores of rupees, but later I thought may be the stay-at-home-moms find this as a good source of earning a little more pocket money, else I can’t see why this section of people would take such surveys. They have also surveys for teenagers and students, which I believe would really help them in supplementing their educational expenses. Since I don’t figure in any of the above target groups I mentioned above I am yet to complete a survey with them; every time I attempt some survey I am screened out early. Well that is understandable and I’d say it is much better than being scammed. Apart from the main target groups they have some surveys though for consumers of various items and I suppose I’d figure in some of them some day and eventually be able to complete some surveys and then get payment from them. If you feel that you are one of those target groups then certainly you can try out this site and get regular payments from them as well, at least you can try as it costs nothing and this is certainly a good and reliable survey site for sure.
My View Survey
This survey site is a funny kind of site; I’d better call it an unreliable site. There are reasons behind making this statement. They reward their responders with what they term as My View Points or MVPs. You get several hundred MVPs for duly completed and approved surveys and when those points stack up to a certain limit then you can exchange them for VISA Prepaid Gift Cards, which can used to make purchases at millions of Visa merchants Worldwide or you can make charitable donations exchanging those points and even get subscription to a magazine as well. They have three kind of VISA Prepaid Gift Cards presently: 25$ , 75$ and 100$ . As far as I can remember and also from the information that is available on Google searches they used to pay previously through Paypal, but now they’ve altered their payment structure. I’ve not reached the payout limit, so I don’t know if it works or not, but I’ve read of complaints where people have stated that they have not got their VISA Prepaid Gift Cards even when they had enough redeemable points and had applied for the same. But I must also add that there are lots of positive feedbacks as well, so what is amiss, if there at all is anything I can only find out once I reach the payout level for a particular option. They have good things as well though, as they say that they reward points even for screened out surveys and that is a very good thing that some survey site considers that Internet time doesn’t come for free. Yet from my experiences with this site all I can tell you is that, I was getting regular surveys from them, but when they upgraded or altered their system, from that time whatever surveys I received the survey links were not working at all and would lead to a blank page. Later they send a survey invitation to me that asked questions about why I was not active and I replied in the appropriate reply box that the survey links are not working, but even after that things didn’t change. So at the moment I can’t give very high marks to this survey site and you can try it out to see how it goes for you.
Global Test Market
This is the best survey siteI’ve worked with so far and I’d definitely recommend this one to everybody whoever wants to earn money doing surveys on Internet.It is one of the oldest survey sites and certainly one of the best. It provides an earning opportunity to responders all around the world, from 49 supported countries, which includes India, Pakistan, Thailand and China, providing them regular surveys and I have found it out to be true by myself. They reward the responders for attending to surveys with Market Points that can be redeemed to cash on reaching payout. Approximately they give about 30 to 80 points per completed survey and when the points tally reaches the 1000 mark then it can be redeemed for cheques in the currencies of the Nation where it is to be sent by mail. I can assure you of this fact, as I’ve asked their helpdesk this question and they promptly replied to my query stating that they certainly do. It would require some time though to send a cheque and they say that it takes generally 6 to 8 weeks to reach the cheques to their International members, if the address provided in the profile is correct and accurate. U.S. cheques reach much faster though as is expected. As per their FAQs, 1000 Market Points are redeemable for 50$ cash! What is more rewarding is that this site also rewards you for screened out surveys and reward 5 Market Points for every screened out survey. I myself have earned a lot of points through such screened out surveys and it appears to be quite a good option when you don’t count in the main target group. This bit of respect is shown by least of the sites and it is very refreshing to find that they are doing that. Presently I am a little less than 700 Market Points, so I hope to reach the 1000 mark in some months from now and then if I get a cheque mailed to me and then the money eventually deposited in my bank account, then I’d give a full thumbs up to this site. I’ve searched Google though and like with any site there are good reviews and bad reviews, but the overall impression was that people has got paid from this good survey site and I certainly would like to get paid as well. Also I’d like to add that they provide the opportunity of Sweepstakes entries for completion of some particular surveys, if your Country falls in the allowed zone and sadly India doesn’t fall in that zone, though China and Japan does, then you can win big prizes ranging from 300$ to 10000$ , if you are drawn the winner. So if you want to join this site then you can try this one out, I don’t think you’d repent; as a matter of fact if you happen to figure in their target group then you’d reach the payout limit in much quicker time than I could.
Game Play Surveys
This is a relatively new survey site and I had just joined it a few days ago. But what is good though it pays 5$ as signup bonus and also for completing the profile surveys; that is new to me as no other site has ever paid me for completing profile surveys. The payout is at 25$ and one of the options of redeeming the account balance is through paypal. Though there are other options of redeeming like Amazon Gift Cards and other goodies as mentioned on the homepage, but I found in my account only the paypal option, so maybe those options are not available for responders from India. Being a non-Indian site they have a unique way though of depicting things; they show the account balance and all the invitational survey amounts and profile survey amounts in Indian Rupees as well as USD, it is unique and no other non-Indian survey site shows such details. They generally provide surveys about the online games that many people, especially children and adolescents play and movies that people watch and if you are a game freak, then you have a greater chance of succeeding with this site. They also provide other surveys but that number is much less compared to the games and videos surveys. Since this survey site stresses so much on games it allows minors to be a member and children starting from the age of 14 can participate in attending surveys on this site, but parental consent is required for that. Since this is a relatively new site not much information is available as of now regarding the efficiency of their payments, but I don’t think there would be much of a problem in this regard, as first of all you need nothing to join, on the other hand you get 5$ for free and they provide regular surveys that can be seen on your Dashboard on logging in (they say though they send survey invitations, but I haven’t received any; all the surveys I found were posted on my Dashboard) and by the look of the things they seem to be a good site and most importantly since they’ve started not so long ago, I guess they’d like to win over people first. So if your brother or sister is a kid who likes to play lots of online games, then maybe you can register him or her here and get some good rewards out of it and purchase them a nice gift with that money! My hunch is that this is a good site, so you can surely give it a try; you lose nothing for that anyway.
So these are mainly the survey sites that I’d worked with in the past, working at the present and hope to work with some in the future as well. I had showered praises on those sites that deserve every bit of it and used choicest innuendoes for such sites that also deserve every bit of it. At the end I’d like to say that the decision of whether to work with a particular survey site or not rests with the individual, as he or she would be benefiting or suffer from the outcome of those hard works done carrying out several surveys and offers made available to them by those sites over a length of time.
Written by meghabrito
I am a simple and honest person and expect the same in return as well.
