MySurvey - End of Survey Glitches and Misleading Payments

I signed up to uk.mysurvey.com in October, 2013. They operate like any other survey panel; you get emails requesting you to complete surveys and you are compensated for your time. I have to admit that you receive several surveys daily: I received 2 - 7 survey invites per day (only a fraction of these are worthwhile, though). There are a variety of rewards to choose from, including Paypal, Amazon Vouchers and Nectar Points. I always chose Paypal which you could withdraw once your account had 345 points (the equivalent of £3.00). Sounds good so far.

I decided to stop using MySurvey earlier last month as I have now had three bad experiences with them.

I received two survey glitches that really frustrated me. I was on the final page of each survey, which requests you to click a button to submit your answers and be credited. Easily done, right? Unfortunately not. I clicked the 'Submit' button and received an error message. The first time it happened, I didn't bother to complain as it was only a 50 Point (about £0.43) Survey. The second time it occurred, however, I emailed them about this glitch and requested that my account is credited. They responded in a few day's time and said my account had been credited. I checked and the points had not been added. I had every right to argue about this, but I simply left it alone, as it seemed like a dead-end and it was a £0.43 survey yet again.

I wouldn't be surprised if these end-of-survey glitches were purposely put there to scam participants out of money. This is only conjecture mind you. However, there is no denying that it's a convenient point for the survey to glitch up; they get participants' answers while not having to pay them. It's the perfect business model...for them!

I didn't really use MySurvey after this, until I received a particularly good suvey offer. They invited me to participate in a 'four stage' survey. If I completed all four parts, I would receive 1000 points (£8.70). MySurvey claimed that I would receive each survey every two days. I agreed to participate. The first two surveys (or stages as they put it) took me about half an hour each to complete and I received them two days apart, just as the email stated. I was given 60 Points (£0.52) for completing these two parts. At this point, I did not worry about this as I believed I would be credited fully after completing all four 'stages' of this survey, as the email indicated.

It had been three days since I received and completed part two, and I there was no email for part three yet. I signed into my account to check my dashboard. There it was, so I clicked the survey link and waited for the page to load. A blank page loaded with a message along the lines of 'you are not suitable to complete this survey'! I tried refreshing this link and clicking on the URL link again but the message remained, so I was left unable to complete this four-part survey. In other words, after spending an hour completing the first two parts I was booted out and was only credited 60 Points (£0.52) for my efforts. What an outrage!

This was the final straw for me. I quit as they have scammed me three times now. Had these three 'errors' not taken place, I probably would still use MySurvey today, because it offers surveys frequently. Some of these surveys did give you a decent amount of money for your time, as far as online work is concerned.

I have probably spent just over five hours on surveys via MySurvey and have accumulated £10 in this time. I have withdrawn £9 and left the last quid in my account indefinitely as I don't want to take another survey if it's from MySurvey! Overall, I do not recommend signing up to MySurvey, but if you do, be prepared for glitches right at the end of surveys and avoid surveys which are divided into 'stages'. They will not hesitate to kick you off them before you have finished.


The Bottom Line: 

Estimated total amount of time spent: 5 hours

Total cash earned from this website: £10.00

My Awful Experience with Get-Paid.com

I liked the sounds of this website and heard positive things about it from other people so thought I would sign up and give it a try. What a waste of time it has been! In short, the online earning opportunities offered through this site are pretty dismal. I will now go into more detail below.

Offers: This section pays members to complete sign-ups, questionnaires and downloads. I can't say I am a fan of 'paid to sign-up offers' but I did check out some of the offers that paid you to complete questionnaires. Unfortunately, I could only complete two of these questionnaires as all the other questionnaires requested a telephone number. I never provide my telephone number as I have enough telemarketers phoning up as it is! 

The paid-to sign-up offers typically pays members about 200 coins (which works out as $0.40 / £0.25). Considering that each offer takes about half an hour to complete, the pay is ridiculously low.

The questionnaires pay members about 10 - 40 cents. As if this wasn't bad enough, the two questionnaires I completed were rejected so I am not even getting paid for them. I could complain about them but for a grand total of 50 cents it hardly seems worthwhile and I doubt I would get it.

I can't say I tried the downloads because they only pay users about 15 cents per download. For the hassle of installing software and the risk that it may contain viruses, it just isn't worthwhile in my view.

There is an 'Easy Offer' that pays you to listen to the radio. After every ten minutes of listening you have to enter a verification code to confirm that you are actually listening. They then pay you five coins (one cent!). While the pay is pitiful this was definitely the most entertaining offer. You can even choose a station to suit your music tastes. I probably earned about 30 cents through this offer. I should have earned more though but my earnings were obstructed as the website commonly crashed partway through listening. If it crashed you had to refresh the page and the timer was reset. They also had adverts that played. If they were a video advert the radio paused while this advert played. The annoying, invasive adverts and the fact that the radio player commonly crashed were both frustrating and puts one off completing this 'Easy Offer'.

They have a 'Business Cards' offer where you have to fill in blank fields. For example, they will request the Company's email address and you need to type it into the appropriate field. Once again, the pay is very low; one cent for every ten correct entries. I estimate that you could complete ten entries in two minutes if you were very fast. This means that you would earn $0.30 (£0.19) per one hour! It's ridiculous.

On the surface, the 'Daily Surveys' offer is the most lucrative opportunity on the site. They have five surveys that pay you between 45 to 75 cents (25-45p). The surveys take about twenty minutes on average and in one instance it took me about 40 minutes to complete one survey! I am a member of several survey panels and know that you can earn about £1.00 - £1.50 each for surveys of this length.

I waited weeks to be credited. The result was shocking - out of five completed surveys, I have only been paid for one; the other four have been rejected even though I completed them fully. I have completed countless surveys through other sites and have always been paid promptly. I have never had a rejection.

The 'Tasks' page offers crowdsourcing tasks sourced from CrowdFlower. In short, they pay you pennies to complete jobs which are often complicated and time-consuming to complete. This is not my first experience with CrowdFlower; it is present on loads of 'earn money online' websites. I can assure you that CrowdFlower tasks are a waste of time on every site I see them offered.

The 'Videos' page pays you to watch promotional adverts. These adverts can be as long as six minutes though, and for between 0.6 - 1.4c per video, it simply isn't worth the time.

I wouldn't even consider the 'Referrals' offer as I cannot promote this website on principle.

The Toolbar offer is the one I use most frequently. They pay you to search using their Yahoo toolbar. After completing three searches they pay you 50c which is not too bad, especially when considering the other offers available via Get-Paid. After this they pay you one cent for every four valid searches (no duplicate searches and no rapid, multiple searches). This seems okay but it turns out you can only earn 11 cents per day maximum; after this you are not paid for searching until the next day. I have now uninstalled this toolbar because I don't use search engines too much and to earn the maximum daily amount, you have to perform 44 valid searches. Most people, including myself, would have to go out of their way to achieve this and for pennies it simply isn't worth it.

Conclusion:

Overall, I think this has to be one of the worst earn-money websites I have ever been a member of. They pay you very little in exchange for hours of your time and effort. As if this wasn't bad enough, they also reject surveys and questionnaires that you have completed properly. I have earned $3.16 after spending a total of nine hours trying to earn money using this website. I would discourage all readers from signing up to Get-Paid.com, as your time is worth more than $0.36 / hour. There are much better opportunities elsewhere.

The Bottom Line: 

Estimated total amount of time spent: 9 hours

Total cash earned from this website: $3.16 (£1.90)

Avoid 'Get Paid to Read Email' Websites - Donkey Mails, Cash Delight, No-Minimum + Archerfish

Get Paid to Read Emails

I thought I would put together a collection of different sites that pay you to read emails. These four websites made it onto 'How NOT to Make Money Online' as they pay you next to nothing in exchange for reading emails. These websites are:

www.donkeymails.com/‎
cashdelight.com/‎
www.no-minimum.com/‎
archerfish.co.uk/‎

I signed up to Donkey Mails after seeing it advertised on various different websites. I also signed up to Cash Delight, No-Minimum and Archer Fish not long afterwards, thinking that I may as well earn some more money along the way. With a low payment threshold for each website, I thought that I would at least get a few dollars / pounds relatively quickly. I knew right away that I wouldn't be getting rich from these sites, but little did I know that after five weeks, I would have accumulated only $1.27 and I could only actually withdraw seven cents from No-Minimum.

The concept for each of these websites are identical; you receive emails in your inbox and click a link which redirects you to a website. Their is a banner at the top of each page which tells you how long you need to wait, and how much you are going to get paid. You typically have to wait 10 to 30 seconds depending on the email (and payment). After waiting the required amount of time, your account is then credited. 

The payment for each email is meagre. You are paid 0.1 - 0.5 cents for each email URL you visit! The majority of the time, I was paid 0.1 - 0.2 cents with Donkey Mails, Cash Delight and No-Minimum. I was lucky if I could receive enough emails to earn half a cent per day with each of these websites.

Archerfish pays you slightly more by giving you 0.25 - 1p (about 0.4 - 1.6 cents) for each site you view. However, I only received a maximum of three emails per day from Archerfish and often there were no emails at all. With sporadic emails and a cash-out amount of £3.00, I estimate that one would need to spend over one year to cash-out. This is ridiculous! Your time is worth more than that.

There is also an option to refer people to each site. You then get a percentage of their earnings. You also get a smaller percentage from each of their referrals, similar to a pyramid scheme. However, since each site is free to use, they are not pyramid schemes per se, but they are still a huge waste of time. Ethically, I would not refer anyone to these websites. Sadly, it seems this is the only way to make money with these 'Paid to Read Email' websites.

After five weeks of reading emails from these websites, and also earning money though their paid-to-click programs, I accumulated:

$0.27 through Donkey Mails
$0.03 through Cash Delight
$0.07 through No-Minimum and
£0.38 through Archerfish (including the 25p sign-up bonus)

The results speak for themselves. I highly recommend steering clear of these types of websites. I quit a long time ago and only wish that I quit sooner. They can keep their pennies! Clearly the only people who actually make any real money with these sites are those who refer dozens of people to them. Of course, I'm sure the website owners have done quite well for themselves too. If I have prevented anyone from signing up to any of these sites, then writing this article was truly worthwhile.

The Bottom Line: 

Estimated total amount of time spent: 2 hours

Total cash earned from all four sites: $1.27

In actual fact, I did not receive a penny due to not reaching any payment thresholds, except for No Minimum. However, it seemed too pitiful (and embarrassing) to withdraw seven cents! 

P.S I'm glad to see I'm not alone; here are a couple of additional reviews of two of these sites:

Donkey Mails: http://adf.ly/ZEcMH

Archerfish: http://adf.ly/ZEcbY

Welcome to How NOT to Make Money Online!

This blog provides a collection of 'earn money online' methods which I have personally tried out myself and been disappointed with afterwards. If a website makes it onto this blog, it will be due to the fact that it pays members such a small sum of cash for their time that it's simply not worthwhile. In addition, some of these websites may not pay members at all. Strangely enough, some websites will do both. For example, a survey website may credit me for some surveys I complete, but for other completed surveys I will not get credited at all.

This website's primary purpose is to warn people (especially those who are contemplating registering) of such websites. By doing so, I will hopefully save you some time, which is well and truly wasted on websites reviewed here. In addition, anyone who has tried to earn money knows that when a prospect fails it is both upsetting and frustrating. I will be truly content, if I can help save anyone from these negative emotions.

I have also added Adfly and a couple of Google Adsense advertisements. I am in no way compensated for writing these articles. I have therefore added these adverts to try and make a little bit of money from each article that I write here.

Please feel free to revisit this site from time to time as I will be updating it regularly.

Thanks for visiting! :)