Paid Surveys and Paid Survey Sites - A Players' Guide for Survey Takers


by Jorge Chavez - Date: 2007-03-28 - Word Count: 712 Share This!

Surveys, as a method of marketing research, have been around for a long time. Recent developments of shorter product life cycles, rapid innovation and the rapid response times possible though the Internet have drastically changed the way surveys are being handled. New companies and new types of companies have emerged, and it is sometimes difficult to understand what is going on without a 'program' or guide book. This article gives you a first rough guide-book "program" to help you identify the players.

The Need. The developed countries are basically market driven. That is the consumer, not the producer or transporter, is king; his or her decisions of what to buy, what not to buy, are the cornerstone of the marketplace. Producers have to know, and know well, what is on the minds of the ultimate consumers. Product life cycles are getting shorter, competition is increasing and good marketing intelligence is increasingly important.

The Environment. The Internet is providing a rapid-response, low cost medium for sampling consumer opinion. Survey makers are finding it economically efficient to pay the survey takers individually for filling out survey questionnaires. This payment assures an adequate data bank of willing survey takers and that vital results can be had rapidly, within hours.

The paid survey business scenario has evolved and changed, which process is continuing as this is written. While the types of players are not all crisply defined at this point, several useful generalizations can be seen.

The Players:

Market Research entities. These are both stand-alone professional research companies and the marketing research departments of large companies or divisions of companies, charged with providing market information and intelligence to there own marketing departments. In carrying out their functions of providing marketing research info to clients or their company, these entities formulate the key questions and usually the actual questionnaires to be used in online surveys. They are also involved in product testing, focus groups and many other aspects of information getting.

Survey Makers. These are the companies that actually get the questionnaires to the survey takers, getting the answers, compiling the results and getting them back to the Market Research people. Survey makers exist because to maintain a database of willing survey takers you have to keep them busy. It is more efficient for the Market Researchers to farm the nitty-gritty of getting the surveys in the hands of the survey takers than it is to try to do that themselves. There are several hundred of these, somewhere between 700 and 1,100. The exact number is difficult to determine because the survey makers are so varied, some do other things as well, some do survey maker business only occasionally, etc.

This is a turbulent and rapidly changing segment of the business, with new companies coming and old companies going frequently. There are many new outfits, some pretenders and wannabes, others are really sales organizations using the "We take surveys" line to lure unsuspecting survey takers to give them their demographic data which is later used to try to sell things to them!

Survey Takers. These are the tens of thousands of people who get asked (and paid for) their opinions with every survey. They come from a wide range of demographics. They are almost all making their principal income somewhere else, but the payments they get from taking surveys are a welcome addition to their total incomes.

Paid Survey Sites (Guide companies). Primarily because of the turbulence and uncertainty in the Survey Maker segment, paid survey guide companies have been formed and have opened paid survey sites to help new survey takers get started off without getting "scammed, spammed and slammed". Based on their knowledge of the current Survey Maker market situation, they develop lists of good, reliable survey makers. Then they offer their services to new would-be survey takers, charge them a small one-time membership fee, give them a copy of their list and guide them through the start-up phase of becoming paid survey takers.

These companies too, run the gamut from good to not-so-good to bad to horrible. There are paid survey review sites that provide information on how to rank and select the current contenders.

There. That is a brief summary of how the Internet side of the paid survey business is set up and how it operates as of the first half of 2007.


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Jorge Chavez is an experienced business analyst at: http://surveysentinel.ya23.com To learn more about making money with paid online surveys visit: Paid Surveys To learn more about comparing paid survey companies to pick the best for yourself, visit: Paid Survey Review

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