What the Paid Survey Directories Don't Tell You

Various survey directories advertise all over the Internet, offering a deceptively-simple looking way for people to make money by giving their opinions to market research groups. These directories offer descriptions of and links to hundreds of companies for a fee. Their enticement is usually some variation of this: "Work at home in your pajamas. Make $1,000-$5,000 a month."

If you click through these ads you'll soon be reading about people who're making an easy living from home, setting their own hours, earning $20-$50 for each little survey that they take for a research group. They state that one can earn supplemental, part-time or even full-time income depending upon how much time one wants to invest.

These claims are fairly exaggerated. Many surveys don't even offer a straight cash incentive to those who take them. They enter you into their monthly or even yearly sweepstakes where you'll have one chance in a hundred, or even a thousand or more, to win money or some other prize. I devoted months to taking these kinds of surveys, and only once did I win a sweepstakes drawing. My reward - a gift certificate for Amazon.com - was certainly nothing that I could buy food or pay some bills with.

Those survey invitations that do offer cash incentives for everyone who completes them are often hard to qualify for. The questionnaires are each aimed at specific types of consumers. Survey directories aim their advertising at people who are desperate to find ways of making money working from home: single parents, people who've just been laid off or who have disabilities that prevent them from working. But one would think that a person who already owns a cell phone with wireless Internet connection, a new car and personal computer both purchased within the last six months, online investments, and a host of new brand-label household products probably isn't desperate to earn a little extra cash for taking a half-hour survey.