Are Paid Survey Sites a Scam?

I have heard this question asked on several forums, and it's something I wondered about myself when I first took a look at paid survey companies.
I did a little digging and found that there are a couple of things that may be causing this misconception about paid surveys and paid survey companies.

Income Claims -
The Income claims you find on many paid survey sites may be one of the big misconceptions behind paid surveys. On many of the paid survey sites you will see something similar to this:
"take on line surveys and get paid $4 to $70 per survey!"
"participate in focus groups online and get paid $40 to $140 per hour!"
"{Blah, blah, blah...."
Now these kind of figures can be obtained through paid surveys but they are a bit misleading if you do not read between the lines.
Like the per survey amount, In most cases it will be the smaller amount, you usually only get a larger amount when you get lucky enough to be a part a tightly focused group where there are fewer participants.

The per hour figure is possible too, but you have to understand how they are getting this figure.
EXAMPLE: If you got one survey job and got paid $10 for that survey, and it only took you 5 minutes to complete, you would in essence be making $120 an hour for that 5 minutes.
The way I see it, I really do not believe you will get filthy rich taking online surveys, but I do believe you can make some money doing something that only takes a small amount of your time.

There are two types of paid survey sites
There is really no way of knowing but I think this may be the biggest reason for “paid survey scam” reports.

There are two types of survey sites you will find on the Internet, one is free and the other is not. Some people think that if you have to pay, then it must be a scam because paid surveys are suppose to be free. Read below and see for yourself why this statement is not true.
The first type is a paid survey company site. The Paid Survey Company site is the site that will actually send you the survey and they are the ones that will issue your check. Paid Survey company sites are in almost ALL cases free to join.

The second type of paid survey site is a Paid Survey Membership site and there is usually always a cost involved in joining one of these sites. The Paid Survey Membership site gives you access to a database of hundreds of "free" paid survey companies and give you some information about the companies.

I really believe that a lot of people join paid survey membership sites and when they realize that it is not a paid survey company, but only a database of paid survey companies they feel they have been scammed, but that really is not true. The paid survey membership site has spent hours and hours putting together A HUGE database of companies it would take forever for you to compile on your own, plus many of them update it on a regular basis, and for a one time fee you get lifetime access and updates. It is really just a matter of how much is your time worth?
So are paid surveys scams? In my opinion, although they may not be your ticket to extreme wealth, I do not feel that paid survey sites are scams, but I will let you take the information in this article and judge for yourself. If you would like to get a free list of companies to see what paid surveys are all about you can obtain a list of 50 companies for free at http://www.surveyincome.com

This article was written by Jon Yarbrough webmaster at http://www.surveyincome.com
Feel free republish this article but please do not make any changes including the resource box.