By Ian | Negative Reviews
Generating an income while surfing the web sounds nice, doesn’t it? If you’re like me, then you’re probably interested in making money online and therefore have probably heard of paid survey sites.
The idea of making money from simply answering surveys online is very attractive, but we need to be cautious with the websites offering these services.
There are several websites out there that steal people’s time and effort by enticing them with attractive rates per survey, but set high payouts and only offer few surveys.
If you’ve been searching for ways to make decent money through paid survey sites, then you’ve probably heard of Valued Opinions.
Is Valued Opinions a legit site, or is just a venue to scam people? Will your time and effort be wasted here?
I am not promoting Valued Opinions and am not connected nor affiliated with them in any way. This review isn’t sponsored and is unbiased.
Valued Opinions is a huge waste of time. Even if you’re looking to make a quick buck, Valued Opinions still can’t reliably offer that. The money-making opportunities are really poor due to the payout and rewards model.
You’re better off spending your precious time on a much more reliable and credible paid survey site. Take Swagbucks (industry’s top-paid survey site) for example. It offers a lot of opportunities to earn points, so you’ll be able to redeem your rewards as fast as possible.
Your time will be much more worthwhile if you join Swagbucks. Read our Swagbucks review to know more.
Alright alright, you don’t have the time to read this entire article. That’s fine. This section is much shorter and concise and will give you an idea if Valued Opinions is right for you. However, if you want to get into the details, please read the whole article.
As far as legit paid survey sites go, Valued Opinions is one of them. Even so, there are three major drawbacks that keep it from being worth your time:
If you came into Valued Opinions expecting to sustain your family with significant amounts of income from working full-time answering surveys, you’ll be very disappointed. You can’t even pay a quarter of your bills with what they offer! Valued Opinions just isn’t that kind of site.
Valued Opinions is a paid survey site handled by Dynata LLC. (formerly known as Survey Sampling International, LLC) — an online market research firm. Various survey sites under Dynata are: OneOpinion, iPoll, and E-Rewards, to name a few.
So if you’ve encountered those sites, there’s no doubt that your experience with Valued Opinions will be no different.
It only took me 5 minutes to sign up for Valued Opinions. The process was plain and straightforward.
After signing up, you’ll be immediately prompted to fill out your profile information to qualify for surveys. The information they ask for is very personal. Although there is an option for you to not answer some of the questions, opting out affects your qualification for surveys.
It takes about an hour and a half to complete your profile and there aren’t any rewards or incentives after you’re done.
Very few surveys are offered per month. So even after the exhaustive process of completing your profile, you still won’t qualify for other surveys. Valued Opinions also offers diary studies or testing of products at home, but do understand that these offers are available only to members that have been with them for a long time.
Rewards can be redeemed once you hit the $10 mark. The payout ranges from $1-$5 for each survey, depending on the length of the survey you’ll be answering.
So if you answer 4-5 surveys a month (hopefully), you’ll only earn $4-$25, and that’s in a best case scenario. That might not even be enough to redeem the rewards offered.
The ONLY payout option available is e-gift cards from companies Valued Opinions is partnered with (that’s right – gift cards). You do have the option to request physical gift cards, but the time to process that request can take up to 28 days.
There’s no other way to get paid. If you’re looking for cold cash and a stable source of income, Valued Opinions can’t offer that.
Here are some of the companies that Valued Opinions is partnered with:
They offer gift cards from Apple, Amazon, Macy’s, Domino’s, Nike, and many more. Most of these gift cards are valued at $20 and carry the option to donate to charity (which is always nice).
This could work for you if you’re just looking to make something on the side. Valued Opinions won’t stand as a consistent and reliable source of income, though.
Don’t just take my word for it. After searching online for legit reviews from other people, I’m even more discouraged about Valued Opinions. Check out what happened to these guys. After completing a few surveys, the system suddenly claimed they did not qualify.
Or how about this person who experienced the surveys disappearing just as they were about to reach the $10 payout minimum.
Our personal information is important. It’s what defines us. Thus, we must take the effort to secure it whenever possible by being familiar with privacy policies. However, I know that not everybody has the time to do that. That’s why I’ve already scanned Valued Opinions’ privacy policy and picked out a paragraph that really stands out.
If you’re not familiar with the “DNT” browser preference: DNT is a web browser setting that requests that a web application disable its tracking of an individual user. Basically what the specific paragraph above means is that you cannot stop Dynata, nor the third parties associated with them, from tracking your online activities.
Upon further research, it seems like this applies to all platforms under Dynata. Yes, all of the platforms including iPoll, E-Rewards, OneOpinion, and many more.
This is a potential point of vulnerability to your privacy and security. It’s a bit unsettling.
The quick answer to that is yes and no. Yes, Valued Opinions is as legit as paid survey sites go. But no, you won’t earn legit money with Valued Opinions.
One of the major drawbacks in using Valued Opinions is that the only payout option available are electronic gift cards through the companies they are partnered with. Plus, the time it takes for money to update into your account after answering surveys is a month.
That’s on top of the high difficulty to qualify for surveys and the low frequency of surveys offered. So if you’re looking to earn cash, this website is a major no-no for you. Valued Opinions is a big let down if you’re looking for a stable source of income.
Another major drawback is that your privacy and personal information may be vulnerable since Dynata, along with third parties associated with them, doesn’t respond to “DNT” signals. This allows them to continue tracking your online activity even after you’ve closed their website and explicitly told them not to.
If you’re someone who’s not looking for a stable source of income, doesn’t mind getting digitally fingerprinted, and has a lot of time on their hands, Valued Opinions may just work for you.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a more credible and reputable paid survey platform where: surveys are not the only way to earn money, the payout and rewards model is very convenient, there are no fishy privacy policies, I’d strongly recommend staying as far as you can from Valued Opinions.
When I discovered Swagbucks, I couldn’t help but recommend it to anyone looking for paid survey sites. Signing up is fast, easy, and can be done in 5 minutes or less.
Once you’ve signed up, make sure to take advantage of all the offers provided. You can earn up to 227 swagbucks right after you sign up. No wonder it’s the industry’s leading paid survey site.
Unlike other paid survey sites that rarely make surveys available, I was more than pleased to find out that there were surveys available immediately after I signed up. This was indeed a breath of fresh air.
Although you won’t be able to qualify for some of their surveys, don’t worry! Swagbucks pays you even if you didn’t qualify for their survey.
There are also surveys that are regularly available from their trusted partners. This ensures that you won’t run out of surveys any time soon. These are just a few of them:
Swagbucks also offers other avenues to quickly earn and save money. They offer an opportunity to earn swagbucks when shopping online. Not only is this helpful when running low on surveys, but it’s also convenient if you’re already shopping online.
Here are some of the businesses they’ve partnered with:
It doesn’t just end there. Swagbucks sometimes offers discounts when cashing out through a specific platform that they’re partnered with. The cashout options they offer are PayPal and Amazon Gift Cards. I find the PayPal cashout option convenient because I’m able to immediately transfer the money to my bank account.
It’s important to note that Swagbucks doesn’t have any minimum limits before being able to cash-out. The lowest offer when cashing out is the $5 Amazon Gift Card.
At the end of the day, we all want one thing: to make money. And I’m here to help you by filtering out paid survey sites that aren’t worth your time.
There really aren’t any downsides to signing up with Swagbucks. Unlike Valued Opinions where your privacy is vulnerable, you receive no incentives for signing up, and surveys are the only reliable way to earn points, Swagbucks answers all of those problems and even over-delivers. There are many ways for you to earn SBs, so you’ll be able to redeem rewards in no time.
As long as you know what you’re doing with Swagbucks, you’ll keep making money. No wonder they’re the industry’s leading paid survey site.
Check out Swagbucks now and see for yourself how a high-level paid survey site is like.
I've been in internet marketing for over 10 years, and I've purchased dozens of illegitimate products for the sole purpose of evaluating them and exposing the truth about these products to anyone who's thinking about purchasing it. I never let money influence my rating of a product and your success/safety is my absolute highest priority. Don't want to buy a product? Register for one of my 100% free internet marketing training courses>>