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Regardless of what you think, all survey companies suffer from the same overall problem. They send you a survey to complete, you spend 5 minutes entering your age, country, yearly income, etc. – only to find out you haven’t qualified for that survey. It’s a waste of both your time and the survey company’s time.

Nevertheless, let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. Any company claiming to offer high wage surveys at the cost of an initial “start-up fee” is a scam. Go to Google, type in “Paid Online Survey” and the first link you’ll see is “Top 50 Free Paid Surveys” from SurveyLot.com. This site advertises a $25 to $75 reward per survey, however, you have to pay an initial cost to sign up with the companies, and they don’t tell you how often you’ll receive surveys from them. These companies simply want to scam you out of your start-up fee and then not provide any surveys at all, or provide surveys to you that have such high qualifications that you won’t qualify and thus not obtain the reward.

Most survey companies have a point-exchange system in which depending on the length of survey that you participate in, you’ll obtain a certain amount of points for it. At a preset minimum amount by the company, you can exchange these points for cash, prizes or other rewards.

Worst Survey Companies

Let’s start off with the worst survey companies, or at least those which do not offer as much as others. These companies either have low point-to-cash conversion rates, or some other factor that prevents them from being classified as a “Best Survey Company.”

A.W. Surveys is a company that pays you to review other survey websites and post your opinions on them. Each survey site you review earns you a neat $4 to $6, which is a pretty good salary for just posting a one or two-sentence comment. The problem is how often new reviews show up. When you first sign up with them, you’ll have about 6 surveys to complete, so within no time flat your account balance will jump to around $25. However, the minimum payout is $75. I signed up several months ago and since then, I still only have $25 in my account. Why? Because although in the site announcements section, the administrators state that new surveys will be “coming soon,” I haven’t received any in almost 3 months. It kind of kills the site’s credibility when what they say isn’t necessarily the truth.

BuzzShed is a BETA site similar to YouTube, where you can upload your own videos and have them rated by the BuzzShed community. In the past, BuzzShed claimed to pay you money to view certain videos on their site. When a paid video was available for view, they would send you an email with the link. All you had to do to get paid was to watch the video and answer a simple question at the end of it (to make sure you were in fact watching it). But there was one problem. There were never any paid videos available for view. And because of this, in February 2009, BuzzShed removed this feature from their website.

Hits4Pay is a website that’ll pay you to read emails, at $0.02 per email. When you first sign up, you get a $10.00 bonus in your account. The minimum payout is $25 but it’ll take nearly forever to reach it. Hits4Pay will send you maybe one or two emails a day, and that’s it. I signed up almost 10 months ago and I only have a balance of about $14.72. Once I reach $25, I’m definitely requesting payout and after receiving it, cancelling my account.

LightSpeedPanel is a survey website that offers many surveys, of which most you will not qualify. Of those that you do, the payout is absolutely ridiculous. The company works off of a $0.01 per point system, but the highest survey ever sent to me (regardless of the fact that I didn’t even qualify for it) was worth 300 points (a whopping $3.00) – and that survey would’ve taken me an hour to complete.

SurveySpot is a popular website, and they send you tons of surveys, but for 95% of them, you don’t even earn any cash rewards. You only earn a few ballots in their sweepstakes, hoping to win the $5,000 prize if your name is drawn. Of the 5% of actual cash surveys that they do send you, they are worth their time completing. The minimum payout is $10 and they only pay by check. I was lucky to qualify and finish two $5 surveys, after which I immediately requested payment. It took 2 weeks before I received the check in the mail, but it didn’t bounce when I deposited it in my bank account, so the company is a legit one. Like I said, though, the majority of the time, completed surveys don’t earn you any cash rewards.

NPD Group is another survey company like SurveySpot, but even worse. They offer no cash surveys at all and just “chances” to win a large $5,000 prize. Again, not worth the time, and certainly not worth the effort. The same applies to any survey company just offering chances to win prizes and cash amounts. If you don’t actually earn real cash from completing a survey, don’t sign up with the company.

TreasureTrooper is one of several websites that pay you to complete certain offers. For instance, if you sign up with a certain cell phone provider (on a specified length of contract), TreasureTrooper will pay you $10 in cash. The company also offers you surveys, but very few are actually worth your time to complete. The main focus of the site is on completing offers. The problem with many sites like these is that you’ll end up spending more money in signing up for a contract than you’ll receive back from TreasureTrooper through their reward system. So for example, TreasureTrooper will pay you $10 to sign up with a cell phone company that charges you a monthly fee twice as high as a normal cell phone provider.

Best Survey Companies

Suffice it to say, the number of survey companies that are actually worth signing up with is extremely low in comparison to the number of companies that are just a waste of your time. In all of the years I’ve spent searching for legitimate companies that pay you a decent amount of money for your time and effort, I’ve only found two that actually qualify as being “the best of the bunch,” so to speak.

GlobalTestMarket is a company that pays you $0.05 per point. The typical survey will earn you 50 points, which is a nice $2.50 for 30 minutes of your time. You’ll get lots of survey opportunities in your email inbox from them, but a lot of which you won’t qualify for. So far, I have a little bit more than 3,000 points in my account. To put things into perspective for you, on their site, 2,500 points is the equivalent to $125 USD, 5,000 points is the equivalent to $250 USD and 10,000 points is the equivalent to $500 USD. As for me, my goal is 5,000 points, at which point I’ll cash out my $250 balance. They pay via check.

Opinion Outpost is the other good survey company. It actually pays better than GlobalTestMarket, offering $0.10 per point. Again, typical surveys earn you 50 points, which is an awesome $5.00 for 30 minutes of your time. It’s the highest-paying free survey site I’ve found on the internet as of today. The best part about this company is that you’ll on occasion receive a survey worth several hundreds of points. I completed a survey several months ago worth 300 points – a nice $30 for a little more than an hour of just clicking buttons and writing answers. I believe the minimum payout was something to the extent of $5.00, and I reached it after the first survey I completed.

The Conclusions

Avoid any company that doesn’t reward you with real cash by completing surveys. Avoid any company that pays you peanuts by offering less than $0.05 per point. And most importantly, avoid any company that has a preposterous minimum payout amount.