Quest for Quiescence

Yesterday I posted the second review of  SurveyLion.com, and the day before that was the second review of GreefieldOnline.com.Today’s review will focus on OpinionOutpost.com. Feel free to check out the first review of Opinion Outpost if you haven’t already. This review will focus on presenting my own opinions and personal experiences after completing surveys for Opinion Outpost for an entire month.

Quantity of Surveys

As I mentioned a couple of days ago,  I received 50 surveys in total during my one month trial. Of those 50 surveys, 20, or 40% of them were from Opinion Outpost. I was able to complete 7 of those 20 surveys for a completion rate of 35%.

Duration

In total I spent 4.5 hours working on surveys for Opinion Outpost. The average time specified for an Opinion Outpost survey was 20.65 minutes.The average time I spent on surveys that I was able to complete was 33.4 minutes. The worst case was a survey that was spec’d to take 15 minutes that actually took 52 minutes to complete! That’s nearly 3.5 times the specified time. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there was one survey that took 8 minutes less to complete than was specified. Most surveys took slightly longer to complete than what was specified. 36 minutes was spent taking surveys that I was unable to complete leaving just under 4 hours (3.9 hours to be exact) spent on completed surveys. Many of the surveys that were not completed took a very long time (typically around 5 minutes) before I was informed that I did not qualify to complete the survey for one reason or another. There were even cases where I had answered questions that provided good valuable data to the researchers, but still did not qualify for compensation. This is not cool.

Compensation

All Opinion Outpost surveys offered some number of points as incentives. These points could then be exchanged for cash payments. The rewards ranged from 15 to 50 points. Since each point was valued at $0.10 the surveys were valued at $1.50 to $5.00 each. For the 7 surveys that I was able to complete, I received 205 points for a total value of $20.50. Based on the rewards received and the total time spent, that put’s my hourly rate at about $4.55/hour. This is not a great rate.

I requested payment a few days ago but so far haven’t heard anything. Since they send out paper checks via snail mail, I don’t expect to see anything for a couple weeks yet. I’ll update this post when I receive the check and let you know how long it took.

Other observations

Some of the surveys from Opinion Outpost were interesting, but many had way too many questions. They seemed to go on and on forever, even restating the same questions over and over again in different patterns. Some of the surveys also had different methods for conveying answers. Examples would be describing your feelings by selecting a picture, or dragging and dropping answers instead of using check boxes or radio buttons. This felt like a waste of time in an effort to appear innovative. It didn’t work.

Conclusion

Opinion Outpost presented a number of surveys during the test period. What I didn’t like was that the surveys took a little too long to complete and worse yet, I ended up spending a lot of time on surveys that I never ended up getting credit for. I did like that all surveys offer compensation for completion but I’m not a fan of the points system. In my mind the only reason for having a points system instead of offering cash, is to leave the door open for changing the points values in the future. A sneaky tactic. I also disliked how they tried to be innovative in some of their surveys in the way that they collected responses. This just ended up in redundant questions and a lot of wasted time.

Still to come on the survey front… Now that I’ve provided two reviews for each of the survey panels, I’ll be posting a comparison between the three. I’ll be offering my advice on whether online surveys are worth doing, which of the 3 I recommend, and maybe some tips for maximizing your earnings.

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