surveyhead.com

===A NEW HEAD ON OLD SHOULDERS===


If you’ve been part of the online survey community for a few years, you can’t fail to have heard of goZing, the now defunct US-based company notorious in its day for both its snail-like payment processing and its unholy alliance with the equally infamous OTX Surveys, the outfit which invites you to sit through endless film previews (twice), bombards you with questions and then waits until you’ve ...
...you’re not part of the target group. goZing finally bit the dust in 2005 when it was bought out by Greenfield Online, the company which later acquired our very own Ciao, and which itself subsequently ended up as fodder for the omnipresent Microsoft. Sounds a bit like that song about the old lady who swallowed a fly, doesn’t it?


Well, if the chaps at goZing were down, they certainly weren’t out - or perhaps they’d spent all ... more

A NEW HEAD ON OLD SHOULDERS

If you’ve been part of the online survey community for a few years, you can’t fail to have heard of goZing, the now defunct US-based company notorious in its day for both its snail-like payment processing and its unholy alliance with the equally infamous OTX Surveys, the outfit which invites you to sit through endless film previews (twice), bombards you with questions and then waits until you’ve swallowed the last morsel of popcorn before informing you that you’re not part of the target group. goZing finally bit the dust in 2005 when it was bought out by Greenfield Online, the company which later acquired our very own Ciao, and which itself subsequently ended up as fodder for the omnipresent Microsoft. Sounds a bit like that song about the old lady who swallowed a fly, doesn’t it?

Well, if the chaps at goZing were down, they certainly weren’t out - or perhaps they’d spent all the money they got from Greenfield – anyway, they returned to the survey scene in 2008 to form Surveyhead, which is part of a larger organisation called United Sample, and which is based in California. So much for the history; more importantly, long-suffering ex-goZing members will be wondering whether Surveyhead is any better at this survey lark than its hapless predecessor, or whether it’s merely the devil reincarnated. And more to the point, is it worth joining or is it better to let sleeping dogs lie? To which the answers would be: “Yes; sometimes; probably; and don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” I should explain…

A HEAD START

If my memory serves me correctly, the old goZing website was a touch amateurish in appearance, whereas Surveyhead’s site looks much more inviting, if a little jokey and cartoon-like in places. The theme is – unsurprisingly - heads, and there are quite a few of them on the sign-up page, including a man who looks like a forty-year-old Prince Harry, along with several potato-head caricatures, with the one at the top left of the screen looking scarily like Marty Feldman in a yellow wig. Perhaps the most enticing image on the page is that of a hand holding a fistful of dollars, five to be exact, since that’s what you get for joining up; seemingly, the new set-up is somewhat keen for us to forget all about the nasty g-word and start earning lots of cash with Surveyhead.

So once you’ve got your mitts on the five dollars, you can then go on to earn a little more by answering a series of relatively short profile surveys (there are currently eight of them), each valued at 20c, and by the time you’ve got to this stage, you’ll notice that as a British member, your Surveyhead stash has already been converted into its sterling equivalent. The rewards page contains a snapshot of your account showing the total amount you’ve earned to date and how much more you need to earn in order to cash out. The cash-out threshold is $25, and again, this is conveniently converted into sterling (around £15 at today’s exchange rate), as are each of the other headings: completed surveys, surveys pending and so on. There’s a slight snag here: as the exchange rate fluctuates, so does the threshold, so your wait until cash-out might be hastened or delayed slightly according to the direction in which the rate moves. It’s pretty much a swings and roundabouts affair though, and since we’re not really talking about huge sums of money here, it’s hardly significant.

IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HEAD

So now that you’ve poked your head around the door, so to speak, simply sit back and wait for the invitations to arrive, and sure enough, you’ll get, well… one a month if you’re lucky. And this is where you’ll need to be on your toes if you want to make any money out of the site, because most of the available surveys aren’t actually communicated to you; rather, you need to log in every couple of days in order to snap up the opportunities before they disappear.

When you log into your account, a list of available surveys will be displayed on your so-called ‘dashboard’, along with the incentives offered and the odds, expressed as a percentage, of how likely you are to qualify for each survey. Don’t set too much store by these percentages though – I’ve qualified for surveys with an expectancy rate of 10% whereas I’ve been thrown out of others giving me a 50% chance, for example – so it’s worthwhile to have a go at all them, just in case. That’s always assuming you have the patience of a saint, however. If you happen to be a member of Ciao’s survey panel, you’ll quickly recognise that Surveyhead uses an identical format, which is to ask you the same old basic profile questions – even though you gave the information when you registered – which can become very tedious, particularly when you’re screened out at the end of it all. Very often the same invitation is rolled over from day to day, presumably until the quotas are filled, and I find it’s best to wait a few days in between log-ins in order to avoid such repetition.

There’s no doubt that Surveyhead retains very strong links with Greenfield Online, by whom many of the surveys are hosted, and the guys from goZing also couldn’t quite resist the temptation to remain friends with the dreaded OTX Surveys, meaning that a large number of the on-site invitations are about films and DVDs. The problem with these is that OTX won’t allow you to take part in a film survey if you’ve done so within the last two or three months, so unless you’re prepared to go through the motions each time, I’d advise deleting these invitations if you know you’ve completed a film survey in the recent past. The good news is that OTX surveys don’t crash midway through nearly as often as they used to, so that’s some consolation at least.

Despite there being a relatively poor qualification rate, the invitations do arrive thick and fast, which is why I’d recommend logging in to your dashboard fairly frequently. The incentives range, on average, between $1 and $3 – about 60p and £1.80 respectively – and occasionally, there’ll be a survey worth $5 or $10, although these tend to be on subjects such as technology and I.T in the workplace and so on. Since joining a year ago, I’ve cashed out twice and expect to reach the redemption threshold again shortly, so with a bit of effort it is possible to wade through all the repetition and earn yourself a little bit of cash for your trouble.

THERE MAY BE TROUBLE AHEAD...

There are a couple of points worth noting if you’re planning on becoming a member, the first of which concerns the speed at which you’ll be credited with your incentives and payouts. Let me put it this way: that snail is back on the scene. Once you’ve completed a survey, the money will appear on your account as ‘pending’ and you can expect it to stay that way for anything up to six weeks, although the official estimate is four. After that, if you’ve been an honest and careful participant, that status will change to ‘earned’. After each survey is closed, Surveyhead will review the results and if anything untoward is noticed, your responses will be invalidated and you won’t get the reward. Be warned, this does happen – I’ve had one survey disqualified for a reason which was never given, but you could lose payment for something as simple as giving your postcode and then accidentally clicking on a region which doesn’t correspond to that postcode, or adding up the number of people in your household incorrectly. So it pays to double-check that you’ve ticked all the right boxes and dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s before hitting the enter button, and it goes without saying that you need to be honest with your answers. If you aren’t, not only are you likely to be disqualified from a survey, but you may well have your membership terminated into the bargain.

Once you reach the magic cash-out threshold, there’s another wait ahead of you which can be anything up to four weeks, despite payment being made via PayPal*. Something else to mention is that there may be an issue with certain browsers, resulting in the redemption button appearing to be disabled, which is what happened to me the first time I attempted to cash out. Having received no response to my enquiry to the help centre, I did some research and found a blog in which Surveyhead members, most of them from the USA, were up in arms about waiting ages for payments, and this naturally caused the goZing alarm bells to start ringing very loudly in my ears. The good news is that a senior member of Surveyhead‘s staff responded to the comment I added to the blog and following a long and protracted series of e-mails, the problem was resolved and I received my money. It was reassuring to know that Surveyhead is concerned enough about its reputation to trawl the internet for any bad publicity and to put things right as quickly as possible, and in fact a paragraph has now been added to the FAQs advising of what do in the event of problems with cashing out. Internet Explorer seems to be the problem browser, so it’s as well to avoid it if you can; my second attempt at cashing out using a different browser went through without a hitch.

HEADS YOU WIN

Taking into account all the pros and cons, I’m recommending Surveyhead as a reasonably good survey site, on the basis that there are lots of surveys for the taking as long as you’re prepared to make the effort, and that they do pay out, even if the process does take longer than a tortoise completing a marathon. Added to which, their personnel have made commendable efforts to put right the flaws which have dogged the site during the past year, and they do at least seem to be making major improvements as time goes on, an indication of their commitment to the continuing success of the site and the goodwill of the membership.

On the negative side, there’s the annoyance of having to enter the same demographic details over and over again, coupled with the long gap between completing a survey and receiving payment for it, which understandably, will put a lot of people off. On balance though, you could do worse than adding this one to your survey portfolio.

*Updated 30th August 2009: There are now several alternative cashout options, including a number of charities to which you can donate your payments, although most of these seem to be geared more towards the American membership.

 

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