YouGov.com is a website that allows anyone to become a panel member for free, in order to collect real peoples’ opinions from across the nation.
YouGov conducts polls and surveys about politics, public affairs, brands, and other topics of general interest. Once you become a member, you will begin receiving invitations for surveys. For every survey you complete, you will earn points.
The points you earn can eventually be exchanged for a variety of different rewards, including T-shirts, tote bags, gift cards, movie tickets, and sometimes even cash.
Not all surveys award points upon completion, however. Some surveys simply enter you into a monthly drawing for cash prizes.
A Different Kind of Market Research
Most market research companies are contracted by major corporations in order to discover what their target market is looking for in product development, advertising, or just general wants or needs.
YouGov.com, on the other hand, has a decidedly political aspect to their market research. They claim to be a non-partisan organization, whose surveys do not represent either a Republican or Democratic view.
However, YouGov does partner with outside organizations to gather opinions from their members. These surveys are completely confidential, and though your responses will be provided to an outside organization, none of your contact information will be.
When you sign up with YouGov, though, you must provide your accurate home address for two reasons. First, they need to know where to send your prizes once they’ve been redeemed. Second, some of their political surveys are specific to a region or voting population.
YouGov Surveys and Prizes
The average survey at YouGov.com will only take about 5-7 minutes to complete, though surveys can vary in length. YouGov says their longest survey will not run longer than 20 minutes to complete.
As for their rewards and prizes, you must become a member of YouGov before you can see how many points you must accumulate in exchange for a prize. Currently, though, they are giving new members a welcome bonus of 1000 points, so hopefully it won’t be too time consuming to earn a prize.
Their respondents seem to be overwhelmingly right-wing, which means their results are heavily skewed. There seems to be no oversight of what polls they're sending whom so we place no stock in their supposed results.
In every survey Yougov throws in a question or two that has nothing to do with the subject but is personal about you. Age, Gender, Annual income, et
It is the sort of information that if it were all ask on ONE survey, you'd NEVER dream of giving it all to some unknown person on the internet.
It doesn't take very long (a half dozen or so surveys) before they could have amassed a marketer's "dream database" about you.
How do we know that aren't selling our personal info to spammers ... or worse?
I submitted my claim for £50 at the beginning of April 2013, and understand it could take up to 28 days to get payment, but as of today 15/8/2013 I have received nothing despite as others, sending emails and only getting an auto response. I did get one reply which said they had problems with their April payments and were looking into it, but this is ridiculous.
I though they were a reputable company obviously not so.
Redeemed on April 9, 2013, until now, nothing, emails ignored!!!!
So pissed off. Stopping my survey until I got paid.
Few years I did the surveys!!
You wait and wait and eventually you try and contact them and all they do is ignore you. Which in the end it gets you more pissed off. I can say that as of today i am not doing any more surveys for them and I am deleting my account with them. They can fuck off with that gift card I ordered. I don't even want it because I am not desperate for it. I'm just really mad that they lied to me and everyone else that's a member with them. If you are reading this Yougov.com I can tell you this....
LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!!!!!!!! Don't email me any more surveys and once I delete my account,don't ask me to come back like you always do.
I reported them to the BBB in Palo Alto, CA – where their U.S. office is located. There are hundreds of online complaints about them not paying out rewards. They appear to be a HUGE rip-off. I would not recommend yougov surveys to anyone. I DO recommend that everyone who has been scammed by them to file a report (online)with the BBB.