Online Survey Sites that don't DQ you or rarely DQ you

[thedorchannel]

mturk.com has TONS of daily surveys that are pretty much for everyone.  its pretty rare to get DQ'ed from them.

[ropar]

mturk.com has TONS of daily surveys that are pretty much for everyone.  its pretty rare to get DQ'ed from them.

Mechanical Turk is not a survey site, although there might be surveys mixed in with their tasks. They're a micro-task site, where you do tiny tasks for 2 or 5 cents each.The work is geared to people in very poor countries who can use a few bucks. I worked for them for about a year, made $88. Not worth the time.

[neminem]

Mechanical Turk is not a survey site, although there might be surveys mixed in with their tasks. They're a micro-task site, where you do tiny tasks for 2 or 5 cents each.The work is geared to people in very poor countries who can use a few bucks. I worked for them for about a year, made $88. Not worth the time.

It is absolutely true that they are not a survey site, but rather a site that has tasks, some of those tasks being surveys. It is not true that they only have tasks that you do for "2 or 5 cents each", or that all the work is geared to "people in very poor countries" - it certainly does look like that on first glance, because there are absolutely a lot more HITs like that than anything else. I was absolutely sceptical at first, as well, and trying to figure it out at first felt like jumping straight into the deep end without learning to swim, but once you know what you're doing, it is crazy good money (I mean, by comparison to other sites where you can get paid to take surveys - obviously not crazy good money in comparison to, you know, actual professional career jobs, but that's not what you'd be comparing against. You'd be comparing against GTM, OO, etc, and mturk is head and shoulders above all those. If you know what you're doing.)

 

The biggest draw of mturk is that, unlike "survey sites", which either give you a single survey at a time, or at best, a list of survey numbers where you have to fish around blindly and have little to no idea how good a particular survey will be until you're well into it and discover it stinks... with mturk, you have an enormous list of tasks, a small fraction of which are surveys, and a small fraction of those being good... but you can find only those good ones, and just take those, and notably, there's a community of helpful people that makes finding those easier if you know where to look. (Notably, /r/hitsworthturkingfor, and the turkopticon greasemonkey script.) There are absolutely surveys that have screeners, and it's completely up to the individual requester whether or not those screeners are paid (turkers hate unpaid screeners, though, and requesters know this), and whether to specify what the screening requirements are - but most good HITs will at least do that much.

 

(The second biggest draw is that the vast majority of surveys there are nonprofessional, research-oriented surveys, which on one hand, might be way less polished, but on the other hand, are usually far more interesting than the 77th giant "which adjectives describe which stores" table of the day. )

 

Since I discovered the awesomeness of mturk (when done right), I've... kinda stopped taking as many other surveys from other survey sites, cause this is my beer money hobby, not my day job, and mturk beats the pants off other sites, so I always go there first. I've cashed out on mturk (i.e. had 10+ dollars) roughly every 2-3 days for the past couple months, with almost no effort. Mturk is awesome (again: if and only if you know what you're doing.)

[ropar]

It sounds like it's changed since I worked there.  Have you made most of that money doing surveys, or are there also other jobs that pay more than a few cents? 

 

I've registered with Amazon payments. Can I use that like Paypal, to put cash back into my checking account? The Help file is vague.

 

I just logged back in and found 3 surveys "for which I'm qualified," and 8 in total, 1 for a native Korean speaker.  Am I missing something?

[neminem]

Yes, most of the money from surveys. I only do the good ones . Every once in a while someone will post something that isn't a survey on /r/hitsworthturking for, and I'll sip from that money faucet for a bit until it runs out (like someone a few weeks back posted a HIT with several thousand tiny images someone wanted text-extracted, that only took a couple seconds each if you were a fast typer and paid a nickel per), but the vast majority is surveys.

 

Yes, you can use it like paypal - you set up amazon payments with your bank, then each transfer goes mturk -> amazon payments (takes about 3 seconds) -> your bank account.

 

Dunno what you're seeing - I'd definitely expect more than 3 surveys to be up even in the middle of the night... but I'd also expect most of the ones that were up to be junk posts of people paying junk and/or with awful TO reviews so nobody smart would take them. I will point out that, because these are generally smaller, usually academic surveys posted by individuals rather than mega-surveys posted by large corporations or their proxies, you generally see a lot more good surveys posted during work hours than outside them, and also, the particularly juicy ones more often than not disappear pretty fast after they're posted. I'd also note that a lot of the particularly nice ones are gated such that you need to have done 1000+ total HITs to get them (requesters often use that to make sure their surveys aren't taken by people who don't know what they're doing yet. Sometimes you see surveys gated to even higher numbers, or to lower, but 1000 is the most common.)

[ropar]

HITS with the word "survey" for which I'm qualified, that pay $1 or more: Some are invitation only, and some are follow-ups. One pays $1 for 60 minutes. 4 hours for $3.25. Really?

 

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchbar?selectedSearchType=hitgroups&searchWords=survey&minReward=1.00&qualifiedFor=on&x=6&y=10

 

You've found some golden nugget in there that's eluding me. Are you doing transcriptions too?

 

Do you think we should start a separate thread for MTurk?

[neminem]

Oh. Yeah, if you're filtering by at least a dollar, you're not going to get too many. The sweet spot is HITs that pay generally 5-25 cents, but also take like 1-3 minutes to do. Occasionally you do get awesome dollar+ surveys, but more often than not, those are gated to invite-only (as you see), and the invitations are usually also found by taking the aforementioned minute-or-less nickel/dimey surveys .

 

I never do transcriptions, not worth my time. In my opinion, transcriptions (or anything else that isn't surveys) are only worth it if you're trying to eek out a full-time job, or if you're going for numbers, and I'm not in that much of a hurry to get to 5k.

 

As I said, the best way to casually turk is just checking hitsworthturkingfor every time you check your email . (You'll notice that most of the HITs posted there, are for less than a dollar.)

[ropar]

Didn't  realize they have email notifications. Going to give them another try.

[neminem]

Didn't  realize they have email notifications. Going to give them another try.

That's... not what I meant.

 

I just meant, every time I check my email, I also check a few other bookmarks as well - a couple forums I frequent for new posts, my rss feed of various blogs and stuff, and HWTF for any particularly juicy new HITs. It's possible you could set something up to post new hits people have posted there to your email, but there certainly isn't anything out of the box. (That said, I have actually heard people talking about an application you can run that will send you that sort of notifications, but I haven't tried it myself.)

 

edit: looks like it's not an application, it's a web page, http://hitgrabber.net/

 

Now that I looked it up and saw how simple it was, and that it also grabs from a couple other sites that I had not previously been checking (just HWTF), I think I will use it myself, too

[ropar]

 

 

I just meant, every time I check my email, I also check a few other bookmarks as well - a couple forums I frequent for new posts, my rss feed of various blogs and stuff, and HWTF for any particularly juicy new HITs. It's possible you could set something up to post new hits people have posted there to your email, but there certainly isn't anything out of the box. (That said, I have actually heard people talking about an application you can run that will send you that sort of notifications, but I haven't tried it myself.)

 

That's OK, I've just added MTurk to my "sites-where-I-can-pick-up-surveys-directly" folder. These are  a separate folder from ones that require an email.  I also have Firefox set to make links a bright red if I've clicked on them before.

 

But I'm getting the same garbage I get with conventional surveys. Poor construction, HITS that I'm qualified for that tell me I'm DQ, surveys that have reached their quota but are still on the board, etc.

[neminem]

But I'm getting the same garbage I get with conventional surveys. Poor construction, HITS that I'm qualified for that tell me I'm DQ, surveys that have reached their quota but are still on the board, etc.

Absolutely - there's piles of awful surveys on mturk. Probably more so even than traditional surveys, because they tend to be pretty amateurish. Actually, really even the good ones are still amateurish, but I quite prefer taking amateurish surveys from college kids than amateurish surveys from megacorps that should really know better, but clearly just don't care.

 

In any case, the nicest thing I find about mturk over traditional survey sites is that you have power - places like /r/hitsworthturkingfor filter out most of the junk and tell you about qualifications, if you find surveys that are closed but still active, you can flag them and they'll be taken down eventually, and you can give badly-paying and/or badly-implemented ones bad reviews on TO (and check TO before accepting). And if you see someone that you know has posted junk before, you can just ignore them (there's actually a GM script to block specific requesters of your choice completely from showing up - I really wish I could do that for a handful of requesters that post surveys on GTM...)

 

Poor construction you just have to live with, though. I think it's kind of cute, sometimes, knowing that you're probably getting paid to take surveys for some sophomore's core psych class that they probably threw together in an afternoon.

[ropar]

 

 

 a GM script to block specific requesters of your choice completely from showing up - I really wish I could do that for a handful of requesters that post surveys on GTM...)

 

Poor construction you just have to live with, though. I think it's kind of cute, sometimes, knowing that you're probably getting paid to take surveys for some sophomore's core psych class that they probably threw together in an afternoon.

What are GM and GTM?

 

The problem with poorly constructed surveys is you often reach a dead end right in the middle. A video doesn't play or there's no suitable answer to a question  or the "continue " button doesn't work.  I'll give it another go tonight.

[neminem]

Oh heh, sorry. GM = "Greasemonkey", a Firefox plugin that lets you install javascript helpers people have written to do various things. There are some really nice ones for mturk - the really essential one is the one that sticks a turkopticon link next to every HIT, so you can see which hits are total garbage at a glance. (By poorly constructed, I just mean questions that weren't clear, typos, etc. Those I just roll my eyes and do the best I can. HITs that actually literally don't work, so you can't complete them, you should be able to filter out most of those by using TO (turkopticon) and just avoiding the ones with awful scores. )

 

p.s. I picked up most of this from browsing the mturk subreddit.

[paulgro]

Pinecone is the only one I can think of that has never disqualified me, even in cases where they sent me a survey about a product or service I never use.  There again, they tend to e-mail preliminary questions first, so you're almost always a match for the actual surveys.  Ipsos I-say and e-Rewards typically aren't bad, though I do get the occasional DQ from them. 

Pinecone is great and they pay $3.00 a survey.

[thedorchannel]

Mechanical Turk is not a survey site, although there might be surveys mixed in with their tasks. They're a micro-task site, where you do tiny tasks for 2 or 5 cents each.The work is geared to people in very poor countries who can use a few bucks. I worked for them for about a year, made $88. Not worth the time.

I make 50+ dollars a day on mturk.  every day.  much of it is through surveys