Online paid surveys are a dream for anyone who has been thinking about working from home or looking to earn some extra income. Giving your opinion in exchange for cash quickly caught the attention of the masses online. With so many people already benefiting from taking surveys online, you may be thinking “Why do companies pay people to take their surveys in the first place?”. This is a core question that everyone taking online surveys should know the answer to.
If you want to know why companies pay for consumers to take their surveys, keep reading!
Valuable product data
Companies continually collect as much product data as possible from their target market. Data collection is done through many means, such as shopping reports on a specific target market. Consumer data may also be purchased from various companies that collect and sell de-identified customer information.
Data from these sources gives companies a quick insight into who is buying their products. While this data provides companies with a lot of information about WHO are your customers, it’s not deep enough to tell them that their customers think.
From a company’s point of view, data about what consumers think about a product is much more valuable than who a consumer is. The only way companies collect this data is by directly asking consumers what they think about a particular product. Most companies collect consumer opinions through the use of surveys, since the responses may be consistent for all participants.
We now know that what consumers think about a product is worth more than demographics, but how does this relate to online paid surveys?
The relationship is simple: companies are already paying for data on WHO your consumers, why not pay for much more valuable data about that our consumers think?
By offering consumers cash for their opinion, the company essentially only buys consumer data directly from the source.
Incentive for consumers to provide data
Imagine if a company you recently purchased a product from called you and asked if they could take a quick 15 minute survey. Would you take the survey?
Most people would definitely give a quick “no thanks” and hang up. Because? Because you’re giving up 15 minutes of your valuable time, you get nothing in return, and the company gets free data.
Companies realize that consumers will not participate in surveys out of the goodness of their hearts. So they turn to the only thing that seems to attract people: money.
This is the perfect compromise for the company and the consumer. Consumers are happy to be compensated for their time, while companies are happy to pay for consumer opinions.
So why do you have to sign up to some random website to take these paid surveys?
It comes down to logistics.
Instead of paying thousands of people individually, companies would rather pay a few dozen websites to distribute their survey. An added bonus is that these independent websites do a much better job of targeting their main demographic than the company itself.
You, the consumer, also benefit by being able to take surveys from many different companies, all in one place.