a rash of panel closings? whats up?

[theskyhunter]

anyone got any ideas on why so many are all of a sudden closing down? just seems strange that so many are going by the wayside.

[rosiesmom]

I noticed that too.  And all the money they are walking away with because the cash outs are high for a lot of us.  Some folks can cash out weekly, but not me.  Just saw that I am waiting on .50 from Ipoll to cash out and that will take a while.  It has been over 2 years since I was able to cash out with them.  Kind of getting scary isn't it?

[KarinK]

Just wondering which ones are closing down?? How did you know? Did they send you a email?

[rosiesmom]

I got an email from Gratis points telling me.  I couldn't get enough points to cash out in 6 months, much less 2 weeks.

[spider]

Aren't most of them run by the same company? I'm wondering if they spread themselves too thin and just want to go forward with only a panel or two.

[jberri12]

Most of the panels were owned by Instant.ly (formerly Usamp).  After SSI (the same people that own Opinion Outpost, etc) bought Instant.ly in January, they cleaned house. As usually happens with mergers and acquisitions, the little guys get the short end of the stick (in this case the panelists, aka us).

[TomServo]

I'm currently down to just Pinecone, and they don't seem to be doing much lately. Not that they were ever as "busy" as some of the others, but they used to be consistently about twice a week or so. Now I can go several weeks without hearing from them at all.  I'm reasonably certain that Pinecone's parent company, Nielsen (same company that does the TV ratings) isn't going out of business (like some of the other survey companies might be) so maybe it's the entire survey racket in general that's fading away?

[JD]

I'm currently down to just Pinecone, and they don't seem to be doing much lately. Not that they were ever as "busy" as some of the others, but they used to be consistently about twice a week or so. Now I can go several weeks without hearing from them at all.  I'm reasonably certain that Pinecone's parent company, Nielsen (same company that does the TV ratings) isn't going out of business (like some of the other survey companies might be) so maybe it's the entire survey racket in general that's fading away?

Definitely a possibility due to data mining. Von's(Safeway) has all my purchase history for years via their J4U program. They have click data from websites, etc. Definitely more data sources to pull from these days.

[bingham]

So far this year I've been let go from 2 panels, both exclusive, special-topic communities. One of them was AT&T Feedback Forum; I was warned last year that they don't keep members longer than 2 years, so when I received a survey masked as a "profile update," I had a feeling they were bidding me adieu.

[oldchap]

Really annoyed about Gratis, I'd completed enough surveys to get a voucher - but they insisted on any survey needing to be validated, which could take 8 weeks

Whilst I did get an e-mail warning of closure they wouldn't pay out in time

So if each member had over £20 they couldn't get ....?

And I'm sure Gratis had been paid by the client