yougov.com

I joined YouGov.com some four years ago now, after reading a review about it on this very site. YouGov PLC is one of the many online survey sites that are available for the general public to make money and share their opinion, and one of the few that make payments in cash.

YouGov itself was founded about six years ago, and despite its name, is not directly linked with the government but is a professional market research agency. It does have a reputable client list, and its results are often published and quoted in the News. Many surveys do contain questions intended to determine individuals' reactions to current affairs and politics.

YouGov actually has 100000 members world wide and has sites in America and the Middle East as well as in the UK. Signing up is very straightforward and can be completed in a matter of minutes, although you will have to provide all the necessary demographic information on the household to ensure that you are sent appropriate surveys. Your account will be credited with £1 just for joining - which all helps. You need £50 to be able to cash out, which seems like a long way off when you first join.

Most surveys pay 50p, although I have had quite a few that pay 75p or £1, and one or two that have paid £1.50. You are going to need somewhere between 80-90 surveys to be able to receive a payment then...You will also receive invitations which do not have a cash value, but an entry into a prize draw. These are drawn regularly, and the prizes can be quite significant e.g. £250 cash, depending on the survey and number of prize winners. I have never won any of these, and I tend to find that I only complete them now if I have time, but try and always complete the paying surveys first.

YouGov also have a weekly prize draw, which is often quite short, and the prize is a £25 credit to your account. I don't tend to do these very often, only when I am surfing around the site, but there is a link to the latest Prize Draw after you complete every survey, so I guess taking an extra second or two here might pay off. It certainly does for a lot of members, as all winners are listed on the site along with their prize money.

I received my first payment in January this year, having finally hit the £50 target. While that would seem to have taken an awful long time (almost four years), at the same time, it is a nice sum of money to receive (especially in January!) for very little effort. As soon as your account reaches £50, a payment request is triggered automatically, and I received payment within a few days, which is the real test of a good survey site - whether they pay its members on time. My account is back up to £5 already in February 07, so perhaps I will get my second £50 cheque a lot quicker. I did notice that there was a long period in my account in 2004 when I never did any surveys, for reasons I cannot remember, but possibly as I was too busy and ignoring all emails of this type, or no doubt I could have got a payment six months earlier than I did.

The site is very easy to navigate and use. Once you are logged on you have several different options under Your account. You can see at a glance the survey codes of all the surveys you have completed, and these are updated the second you complete the survey, and you receive a prompt to visit your Account page, so you can confirm your payment has been updated.

It is also worth checking your Profile information periodically. Certainly you will need to update it if you move home for example, but your circumstances/lifestyle no doubt change from time to time and this might be relevant to the questions asked in the profile information.

Survey invites are sent out via email, unsurprisingly, and it is therefore very important to keep this up to date. Ideally you should reply as soon as possible, but I have found I have been able to answer surveys which have been in my inbox for a day or two. If you have been invited to a survey, then you can also access it and reply to it from your account page itself.

One of the beauties about this site, compared to so many other survey sites, is that once you have the invite, then you can always finish the survey - you do not get booted out of it when you are 50% through the questions, because of some answer that you gave means you are not part of the intended audience. So in that sense, while the payout is quite high, you know you are not wasting time chasing something that is impossible - providing you reply to your emails in a timely manner, you will get a payout eventually!

One of the most regular surveys they do is the BrandIndex survey. I have to say I HATE filling this one in. It is a monthly survey intended to garner public opinion on both political and corporate issues, and it does this by asking your general feelings towards a whole heap of brands across different sectors. I personally hate it as I am pretty neutral to many brands, having neither a high or a low opinion of everyday brands, and this does not change much from month to month. I think there was a time when the survey itself did not pay - all participants received was an entry into the prize draw - but now it does pay 50p a time, and an invite seems to be pretty much guaranteed every month.

I only recently discovered that by inviting friends to join the site, you can earn referral credit..had I known this sooner I might have cashed out a LOT earlier! So far since late last year I have earned £7 for effectively doing nothing, other than inviting a couple of friends and family to the site. If you are thinking of joining up, then don't forget to do this.

Overall while many people may think that it takes too long to reach the payment, it also takes very little effort to do so with this site, as respondents are not screened out mid way through. I am sure that it would be possible to make the payment in a lot less time than I did, simply by responding to every invitation, perhaps entering the Prize draws more often, in the hope of winning there, and by inviting a couple of friends and family earlier. One of the big attractions is that rewards are paid in cash, and the amount, while it is not possible to reach that in a year, is still a nice amount to receive now and again.