Many personal finance websites advertise completing surveys or doing other menial tasks online like watching movies or playing games as a way to make extra income.
The reality is that personal finance websites gloss over the dark side of taking surveys, and these personal finance websites earn a commission through affiliate links when you complete surveys that are linked to their website. The more surveys you complete, the more money the personal finance website earns.
Personal finance websites that advertise surveys as a way to make money are seriously financially interested in keeping you stuck in a cycle of low-paying, dead-end work.
Personal finance websites profit bigtime when you take surveys for pennies.
Some personal finance websites earn big bucks when you complete surveys that are linked on their website. One of the most lucrative personal finance websites, Making Cents of Cents, routinely earns about $100,000 or more per year just from affiliate links to survey companies. From just 2016 to 2018, the personal finance website earned at least $313,351.25 from survey affiliates alone.
Making Sense of Cents earned at least $92,175 from survey websites in 2018. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the website’s earnings:
- December 2018: There is no income report for this month.
- November 2018: Survey companies – $10,192.50
- October 2018: Survey companies – $9,877.00
- September 2018: Survey companies – $10,985.50
- August 2018: Survey companies – $10,372.50
- July 2018: Survey companies – $9,125.50
- June 2018: Survey companies – $8,062.25
- May 2018: Survey companies – $8,093.50
- April 2018: Survey companies – $6,015.25
- March 2018: Survey companies – $5,021.50
- February 2018: Survey companies – $6,095.00
- January 2018: Survey companies – $8,334.50
Making Sense of Cents earned $118,776.50 from affiliate links to survey websites in 2017:
- December 2017: Survey companies – $12,982.50
- November 2017: Survey companies – $6,955.75
- October 2017: Survey companies – $7,552.25
- September 2017: Survey companies – $5,971.25
- August 2017: Survey companies – $7,432.50
- July 2017: Survey companies – $8,382.25
- June 2017: Survey companies – $10,193.50
- May 2017: Survey companies – $11,720.50
- April 2017: Survey companies – $10,009.25
- March 2017: Survey companies – $10,291.50
- February 2017: Survey companies – $13,187.25
- January 2017: Survey companies – $14,098.50
And Making Sense of Cents earned at least $102,399.75 from survey websites in 2016:
- December 2016: Survey companies – $12,082.75
- November 2016: Survey companies – $11,389.50
- October 2016: Survey companies – $10,565.25
- September 1016: Survey companies – $9,798.50
- August 2016: Survey companies – $7,322.50
- July 2016: Survey companies – $11,980.50
- June 2016: Survey companies – $11,714.75
- May 2016: Survey companies – $8,275.00
- April 2016: Survey companies – $6,805
- March 2016: Survey companies – $7,388
- February 2016: Survey companies – $5,078
- January 2016: Making Sense of Cents earned $34,175 in affiliate income this month but there is no detailed breakdown of how much money came from just survey websites.
It’s also very telling that survey companies are consistently among the highest-paying affiliates for Making Cents of Cents according to previous income reports from that website. Each month (with one exception) from 2016 to 2018, survey websites were the second highest-paying affiliate, and survey websites paid significantly more money than any other affiliates:
- In 2018, survey websites paid Making Sense of Cents an average of $6,423.11 more per month than the next highest-paying affiliate.
- In 2017, survey websites paid Making Sense of Cents an average of $8,190.52 more per month than the next highest-paying affiliate.
- In 2016, survey websites paid Making Sense of Cents an average of $7,404.40 per month more than the next highest-paying affiliate.
A similar story is likely true of the many other personal finance websites that promote gimmicky, poverty-wage “solutions” like taking surveys, playing games, watching videos, testing apps, or other menial tasks for poverty wages—Making Sense of Cents just happens to be one of the rare websites that actually publishes exactly how much they made from survey affiliate links.
There are countless other personal finance websites that have dozens or even hundreds of articles advertising surveys and doing menial online tasks as a viable way to make money. This is more than a coincidence—it’s an intentional and systematic business model at the heart of the personal finance content industry.
Because many personal finance websites receive a substantial portion of their affiliate income from survey companies, they are financially incentivized to downplay just how little you are likely to earn from survey websites. It’s profoundly unethical to advertise surveys as a viable way to make significant money because the reality for most people is that surveys pay substantially less than minimum wage.
The dark side of taking surveys to earn money
These websites often don’t mention or downplay the fact that surveys often pay less than minimum wage and that you often will be disqualified from the survey after you already answer most of the questions for not fitting into the survey’s desired demographics.
And surveys often require a minimum amount of points or hours worked before paying out your earnings, making it even harder to recoup the money you’ve earned—especially if you keep getting kicked off of the surveys because you don’t fit the desired demographics.
Survey websites pay less than minimum wage.
Some personal finance bloggers advertise that completing surveys helped them pay off their student loans—implying, misleadingly, that you can easily earn significant money by taking surveys. On Making Cents of Cents, Michelle Schroeder-Gardner says, “I put every extra dollar I earned from online surveys towards my student loan debt, and it helped me pay it off really quickly.“
However, the reality is that surveys most often pay abysmal rates below minimum wage. According to NerdWallet, “To see if taking surveys online to make cash was worth the effort, some NerdWallet writers put a few apps to the test. The results were not impressive: They spent more than 50 hours and made less than $90 total.” If you make $90 in 50 hours, you’re averaging $1.80 per hour.
NerdWallet continues, “No matter the site, the earnings from taking surveys can be meager compared with other work opportunities. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour; in our test of popular survey sites in 2017, hourly earnings ranged from 41 cents to $2.03.”
Personal finance websites often downplay the poverty-level income that comes from taking surveys online: Making Sense of Cents says that “While the average person won’t earn $100 a day on Swagbucks [a top website for taking surveys], it is possible.” In another piece of content, Making Sense of Cents implied that it’s possible to earn over $500 from Swagbucks.
However, eBiz Facts fact-checked this claim and found that “you can only earn about $1 per hour on Swagbucks, so reaching $500 would take you three months of mind-numbing 40-hour workweeks.”
NerdWallet’s and eBiz Facts’ findings are bolstered by numerous complaints by low-income earners about the abysmal rates that surveys pay. R/PovertyFinance, an online forum for low-income earners, is littered with complaints about just how low paying surveys are from people who have tried taking surveys as a means to get by.
Here are just a few of the comments from people on one Reddit thread in r/PovertyFinance about their experiences using survey apps to earn money:
- “I used to make $20 or $40 a day sometimes but took most of the day.”
- “It’s not a good side hustle. It barely makes anything.”
- “You can make around $2-3/hr.”
- “At the beginning you can make $30. Then they start kicking you out of surveys saying you don’t qualify, then it takes 8 hours to make $5.”
Here are more comments by people in another Reddit thread:
- “I’ve been doing surveys for about 5 years now. I can confidently say…the pay will always be below minimum wage, maybe 1/5th at max.”
- “Waste of time. Survey sites just want to advertise to you. You’ll get a couple decent ones meaning 2 to 3 dollars and then you’ll pull your hair out trying to reach the payout threshold.”
Low-income earners suffer the most when personal finance websites advertise taking surveys as a viable way to make money. It’s time that personal finance websites provide real solutions instead of exploiting your needs to profit from your disenfranchisement.
Paid surveys exploit the most economically disadvantaged.
Experiencing poverty is detrimental to your psyche: There’s evidence that experiencing poverty alters your decision making because it narrows your focus on quick fixes to resolve your immediate needs, often at the expense of addressing your long-term economic needs.
Surveys specifically exploit low-income individuals because people with low incomes are more likely to fall victim to present bias. Present bias means that your attention is focused on solving immediate problems—like paying this month’s bills—often to the detriment of solving long-term problems. If you spend so much time trying to put out financial fires, you’re going to struggle to plan for your long-term financial prosperity.
If you take surveys to try to make ends meet now, you’re only focusing on solving the immediate problem (your current lack of money) rather than addressing the root of the problem (having a job that doesn’t pay a living wage). The more you take surveys to make ends meet, the more you accustom your brain to prioritizing your immediate, short-term needs at the expense of solving your long-term problems.
And while sometimes you do need to focus on short-term solutions, taking surveys is the most extreme version of short-term problem solving. When you take surveys, you’re not focused on how to earn your next $100—you’re focused on how to earn your next $1.
The more you take surveys, the more you condition yourself into trying to get $1 richer instead of $1,000 richer or $10,000 richer.
When personal finance blogs advertise surveys as a way to make money, they exploit your need for solutions to economic disenfranchisement. Instead of helping you find long-term solutions to earning a low income, some personal finance blogs offer quick fixes that benefit them while keeping you disenfranchised.
When personal finance bloggers know that survey websites pay pennies, it’s deeply unethical to mislead people who are desperate for economic empowerment into thinking that surveys pay more than they actually do.
Menial online work ruins your self-worth, blunting your earning trajectory.
If you earn a low income and are tempted to complete surveys to make ends meet, don’t do it.
The longer you do low-paying, dead-end work, the more you will condition yourself to accept less than what you deserve—and the more you will normalize solving immediate problems at the expense of solving long-term problems. That’s why it’s so incredibly predatory to advertise taking surveys as a way to make more money each month.
Settling for low-income, dead-end work is incredibly destructive to your psyche. If you normalize chasing pennies over and over, you’re eventually going to believe that that’s what you’re worth, and it’s going to increasingly difficult to start seeking out and taking opportunities that pay you what you’re worth.
Getting paid literal pennies is going to blunt your earning trajectory because you will get stuck in a cycle of not believing you’re worth any more money than what those surveys pay you.
What to do instead of menial online work
If you want to increase your income, you not only need to increase the amount of money you’re bringing in each month—you need to increase your earning potential. Earning money from completing surveys and doing other menial tasks online does not increase your earning potential. It’s a short-term solution to a longer-term problem.
The problem you have right now is that you’re either struggling to making ends meet or you’d like to consistently make more money than you currently are making. If you want to stop the cycle of not having enough money, you need to learn skills that will get you paid at a higher rate and/or you need to apply for jobs that pay you what you’re worth.
Relying on surveys for extra income will also blunt your earning trajectory because you’ll waste time on surveys when you could be applying for higher-paying jobs instead. Instead of wasting your time earning $1–$2 per hour, put in some job applications or research skills that you could learn to increase your earning potential.
The key takeaway is that you should be skeptical of anyone who tells you that taking surveys is a viable way to earn extra income—enough income to, for example, pay off your student loans quickly. These kinds of claims are made to entice you to clicking on the survey links on their website so that they can make money off of your disenfranchisement.
Instead of completing surveys to earn pennies, focus on increasing your earning potential and seek out opportunities that pay you what you’re worth.