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.
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I do find that survey invitations are not as frequent as some other survey sites but, once you are offered one, you don't get screened out, ( an annoying feature of some sites}. Some of the surveys can be quite long and repetitive but I'm prepared to take all that are offered to build up points. You have to be careful at the end of each survey to decline the offer of redeeming points for entry to the prize draw if you want to save the points.
1) They will often times notify you about multiple surveys. You can see them under your list of "available surveys" but as soon as you complete one, the others will disappear and you will be notified that there are no surveys waiting. This happens more and more as your point accumulation increases.
2) Very, very rarely do you ever get anything more than the minimum points for completion. I can only recall three surveys where I was awarded 1000 points, but typically no matter how long or detailed the survey, it's 500 points.
3) Customer service will respond to any question with "we will look into this and get back to you" but they will never EVER get back to you.
4) They are very good about redeeming the low level point prizes, but not so good about the big point prizes. And the quality of the prizes has changed. I redeemed for a t-shirt awhile back and it was a cheap flimsy comparison to the shirt a friend of mine had redeemed for a year earlier.
5) After 5+ years and only one other prize redemption, I am still no closer to the big money prize. I'm determined to stick it out but I would not recommend this particular site because of the amount of time it takes to get the top prize: 100,000 pts at 500 per survey = 200 surveys at 5-20 minutes each. That's a ridiculous amount of time for $100.
6)Finally, the surveys themselves need work. They will frequently repeat surveys and even repeat questions within the same survey. Quite often they are biased where almost any answer leads to the same idea, but you can't skip questions.
Other times they just don't make sense. A question will ask you if you've tried a product and you might say no. The next five questions might ask you to choose words to describe or review the same product you just said you never used or heard of. You can't skip the questions so you have to say something you've never tried is "better than other brands because it's good quality" - doesn't seem ethical.
If you just love taking surveys and don't care what happens to the information next you might enjoy it. I joined thinking I could complete a survey every week and earn some extra cash. Sometimes I go months without getting a survey. Or I get one and it's very long and/or biased.
Not worth the effort at all.