Is SurveyCompare legitimate and can I make reasonable money from doing online surveys.

NEW My report on Online Survey Sites.

Recently I saw advertisements on the internet for SurveyCompare. The impression their advertising gave me was they had clients who wanted to find out people's opinions. I like to test services so I decided to sign up and find out more.

It turns out SurveyCompare isn't what I thought it was. SurveyCompare to me is little more than a business that is promoting other businesses. It is the other businesses that have the clients that would like you to do surveys. Often these other businesses will pay a small fee to a business to promote them and get people to participate. That to me is what SurveyCompare is doing.

You actually don't need to participate through SurveyCompare at all. All you need to do is to know the list of businesses that want the surveys done and sign up direct. In a way this is the value that SurveyCompare is offering, that is to save you time finding the survey sites. SurveyCompare submits your information to the other sites and then you receive links to complete your information for the survey site. In most cases SurveyCompare passes on only a little information and doesn't really save much time compared with signing up direct.

The sites SurveyCompare promotes are:

Toluna
GlobalTestMarket
Valued Opinions
Your Voice
Mint Surveys
RewardsCentral
SurveyVillage
Big GiveAway (this is a competition site and not a survey site)
MySurvey
Hiving
MyOpinions
YourOpinion

As to whether you can make reasonable money I have a feeling I doubt if you could return a good amount for the time involved. I signed up on the 30th of December and after four days am probably lucky to have made about $5 in total across a number of sites. None of this is available often until I make about ten times that amount on a particular site. Completing all the profile question was time consuming and I'd have already put in somewhere between 5-10 hours. Each day I receive a couple of survey invitations where I again ask questions but then find I'm not a suitable candidate. More time with no return.

Whilst I'm not particularly concerned, it should be noted that these sites now have considerable information about me, my interests and my buying habits. I am hoping that information isn't passed on and I start getting direct marketing material. I don't think so because the value the survey companies have is by not providing this information to clients so clients have to use their services as that is how they make money. So far I've not received any additional unexpected marketing.

So to the questions is SurveyCompare legitimate and can I make a reasonable amount of money doing online surveys, the answer is SurveyCompare appears to be legitimate but not what I thought they were. To me SurveyCompare is little more than an affiliate marketing front end. How they can place on their site logos of major companies and the companies don't do anything about it I don't know. I for one wouldn't want companies to use my business logo without direct permission. Perhaps they have received it, but since they don't directly work with the companies I can't see how they could have. You can easily avoid providing your information to SurveyCompare by going direct to the sites for the survey companies and signing up. 

As to making reasonable money, I don't think this is likely. I consider reasonable money to be a third to a half of what you'd receive for employment since you can do surveys in your own time when you'd otherwise be doing nothing and you don't have the overhead cost of going to and from work plus all the associated work costs. Because your costs are negligible you don't have to earn as much to get a reasonable return. However, based on the hours invested so far equating to about $1 an hour or less, I don't consider this to be a good or acceptable return.  I will however continue to test the various survey sites over the next week or two and see if the return improves.

Kelvin Eldridge 
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

UPDATE - 3 January 2013
Received an email from SurveyCompare for Great Australian Voucher. This is little more than an entry to win a gift card but then uses marketing designed as a survey. Don't fall for it. This isn't a real survey for your opinion, just a survey to get leads for businesses. This has nothing to do with making money from doing surveys and is just disguised direct marketing.

UPDATE - 11 May 2017
I've now made available my report on Online Survey sites which I wrote in 2014. You can find it at http://www.justlocal.com.au/clients/onlinesurveyreport/.

UPDATE - 24 January 2019
When doing the surveys I created a calculator that would help me work out if the survey was worth doing or not. The Survey Rewards Calculator allowed me to enter the points or minutes for the survey, the reward and determine the equivalent hourly rate. Who really wants to be working for $1 or $2 an hour. I found the calculator and thought I'd make it available to others. You can find the calculator at www.onlineconnections.com.au/surveys/.