Leaderboard

Here's some other insights to why "Rankings" are meaningless and only the inexperienced panelists believe in them. Most "survey panels" are actuality administrative fielding services. Meaning they don't produce surveys, they manage just the panelists and presenting surveys for another company, anonymously. This yields a “untouchable” type status for the clients and as we’ve seen, some fairly prevalent unethical conduct of the survey clients can emerge. You can discern this by watching the URL changes during the progression of the survey. The survey will progress to domains companies that you didn’t see in the survey offer, TOS and privacy statements. Those individuals that install web connection monitoring, like the EFF Privacy Badger, will see even more activity. Some of these connection are a source of revenue for the panel. The survey panels manage the recruiting, accounts, rewards and other panelists concerns. They also provide a buffer against poorly authored surveys. For example surveys that abort spontaneously and stop responding. They do this by providing "deflection support” for the client. Deflection support are typically canned replies that say "not our problem" and the helpful ones will suggest tossing your cookies as a means to resolve the issue in the future. They don’t care. So, doing this installs a business layer between the actual survey company and the panelists. The ostensibly the survey companies and fielding services have used such practices, as a way to protect themselves from bots, charlatans and other types of abuse. They also use this obfuscation arrangement to deny serious panelist responses that don't fit the objectives of a survey, and not pay the pennies panelists would otherwise be entitled to, this is commonly referred to a "survey scrubbing", the client has a bias to pay for survey responses that bolster their objective. I experience this most frequently in financial oriented surveys. So instead of screening the panelists out during the survey, the client performs this on the back-end and the panelist expended a lot of time. I think this is a sign of novice, cheap survey design, and wanton, unethical conduct. So, if a survey panel declines because of a poor reputation, stale membership, too many survey cheats or just wants a long vacation, they shutdown. The panels finance the vacations with the panelist rewards that could not reclaimed because of the rewards thresholds or abrupt, unannounced closure. The survey client of the panel that ceased operations just finds another panel to continue their behavior. If you’re inclined, please elaborate your experiences.

olive

Pit

lawn

Grass

I usually decline to give it up for a regular survey. That's extra data, and they should pay much more, for it. Some are tricky, and wait until the end to ask for name & address, which is disingenuous, imo. If they demand it, and refuse to closeout the survey and pay me, then I'll do what I can to get through without providing the actual info, or tank it early on next time, and grab my consolation pennies. Sometimes they get clever and ask for the 4 digits after your 5-digit zip code, which is the same thing as giving up your name and address.I don't mind doing it for product testing (obviously needed).

Green

If rankings are based on user reviews then why is a garbage site like Branded Surveys at the top of your list? Your ranking s are based on who is paying you to shill first, user reviews second.

Cherry

Pie

Dessert

Also get asked that information for certain political surveys so they can verify voter registration status I suppose.

I always exit out of a survey that asks that info. They don't need it and surveys are supposed to be anonymous. All they need is zip code and state. The only reason to give full name and addy is if they are going to send you a product test.

Icing

It's never happened to me on LifePoints, but losing points is normal on most other survey sites that I've tried although it's annoying. It's worse on GetPaidTo and anything involving the YourSurveys survey router; GetPaidTo will sometimes reverse my earnings because YourSurveys will report that one of my surveys was rejected (they never tell you why) and occasionally they'll say it was a mistake and apologize, but GetPaidTo never gives you the points back even if they were taken by mistake.

I had five hundred points taken,but by the time Lifeless did the claw back, I had cashed out. So, My account is at -500 points. What probably happened is the client that Lifeless fielded the survey for was scrubbing the survey results and your responses were out of bounds, probably not wrong, just what they can't use. They didn't want to pay for your answers. Perchance, do you recall if it was a financial survey? I've had financial surveys scrubbed at Pointless clubs and American Consumer Opinion (ACOP).