Opinion Site Review: Lighting the Way or A Shot in the Dark?
Updated on: August 31, 2018 by anvitalis
Opinion Site is a simple survey site that has been around since 1997. They are a run of the mill, bare-bones survey site with no real unique characteristics, except one.
The site offers two different panels. One of them is for general consumers, while the other is for healthcare professionals.
If you are a healthcare professional, this may be a bonus for you. For the rest of us, the consumer panel it is.
Signing Up
This is an interesting story. I always like to give these sites a shot myself before I write a review. I can find all I need to know online, but nothing really replaces first-hand experience.
The process was standard at first. I clicked on the consumer panel option and filled out the contact information. At the end of the form, there was a captcha, but it said that the captcha site was offline. I was prompted to enter the words shown, but there were no words show because, well, the site was offline.
I gave up and came back later. When I clicked on the consumer panel option this time, I was told that my information was not consistent with was needed to join to panel. I tried again, and it said they already had my responses.
As a result, I have no clue if I am signed up or not. If not, I am not sure what about my information was made me not a candidate unless they are currently only open to a specific demographic or those from a particular location. If this is the case, it is not noted on their website.
Surveys
I cannot find out much about their surveys, but what I can see is that they are pretty run of the mill. Some are longer than others. A good average for most of these sites is around 20 minutes per survey. I did find some complaints about screening out.
Now, screening out is very common with survey sites. However, the better ones do all they can to prevent sending you surveys that you will not qualify to complete. There is a profile survey with Opinion Site that should prevent this some, but I was unable to access it due to my sign-up difficulties.
The complaints are mostly related to the fact that screen outs often come after spending a significant amount of time on the survey. In general, the best survey sites are able to organize the questions in such a way that if you are going to screen out, it happens early on, so less time is wasted.
There is no list of surveys on the website. You can access them by email invitation only.
Rewards
This site works on a point-based system like many other survey sites. Their rewards are greatly limited. The only one noted is a $10 check that is available for 1,400 points.
Most surveys are worth 500 to 2,000 points. Once you sign up, 1,400 points are credited to your account. They say they will credit 2,800 more for filling out the profile survey.
There is no option for PayPal payment or direct deposit. There are also no gift card or e-gift options. According to reviews and their terms of service, payment can take 6 to 8 weeks to receive.
The Better Business Bureau
I always head to bbb.org to see what a company profile looks like. This one doesn’t look so great. They have a D- rating. The low rating is due to the fact that they have 12 complaints, and 10 of them they did not respond to.
The ones they did respond to were about non-payment. In fact, they did get paid, per the company response, but it takes a long time for payments to process.
Comparison to Other Survey Sites
Opinion Site does not offer a way to access surveys on their website like many similar sites. This means there is no way to see how many surveys they have available. You may never see one from them, or you may be inundated with email invitations to surveys.
There is also very little variety in rewards. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as most people want the cash anyway, it looks like it may take a while to get it. The payout threshold is pretty high.
Even if you earn the maximum number of points on every survey, which is highly unlikely, it would take seven surveys to earn $10 after your sign-up bonus is used. At an average of 20 minutes per survey, that is over 2 hours to earn $10. This is a best-case scenario.
Is Opinion Site Legit or a Scam?
While I am not a fan, I cannot say that Opinion Site is a scam. Despite that fact that it takes a while to get paid, it does seem that payment eventually comes.
They do not ask for money or require you to enter credit card information, so they are not scamming money. They are a legitimate survey company.
Conclusion
While this isn’t a bad site to join, there really are some better options. The long time it would take to reach payout coupled with the requirement to wait for email invitations for surveys and the crazy long payment processing time makes me not love it.
If you are serious about taking surveys for money, we recommend MySurvey and Swagbucks as better alternatives. Skip this one and find those that will waste less time and help you make money faster.