My favorite survey sites

Speaking of paid surveys, I have had a small but steady stream of income lately from MySurvey. The pay is not as high as Pinecone. Most surveys at MySurvey pay 150 points, which is equivalent to $1.50. But the surveys come more often than the Pinecone ones, and the process is a little more streamlined. I get enough survey offers, and qualify for enough full-length surveys, to cash 1000 points for $10 out about every other month.

Full disclosure: I get about $1.50 per referral. I can honestly say this is my favorite survey site, but you should know I'm not completely impartial.

Honorable mentions:

Brand Institute/Online Global. This one was sending me surveys about once a month for a while, but I suspect they've been ending up in my junk mail folder recently. I've got to figure out how to correct that. They pay about $2/survey via PayPal. The surveys are sort of fun and different--most are about names for new drug brands. If you're in the medical profession, you'll qualify for tons of stuff from these folks. As a plain old consumer, I don't qualify for everything but still like this site a lot.

American Consumer Opinion. For some reason these folks have stopped sending me surveys, but I know several people who make good money with this one. The pay varies per survey, from a couple bucks to as much as ten bucks. I do get paid for referrals on this one.

E-Rewards. The best thing about this site is that you often get paid much more for your time if you do NOT qualify than if you do. For example, often a full 20-minute survey pays $3 in E-Rewards currency, but you get paid $.50 in E-Rewards currency if you do not qualify. It takes less than a minute to find out you didn't qualify. The bad thing about E-Rewards is that the ways to redeem your rewards are very limited. There are a few obscure online retailers that allow you to redeem through them, but for me the best deal is airline miles. Little did I know you can only redeem E-Rewards currency for flight miles once per year for a given airline.

Lightspeed Panel. This site offers surveys pretty regularly, and most of them are fairly interesting. However, they fill up pretty quickly, so I haven't yet managed to earn enough points to redeem. I started to join their affiliate program, but balked when asked for my SSN (MySurvey warns that they'll ask for it when I reach the $600 mark in one year, but doesn't want it up front). [Edit: The number of surveys they send out has picked up considerably since I wrote this post. I have not qualified for one cash-out and am about to qualify for another. Nov. 2006]

Also-rans:

SurveySavvy. This site is characterized by an odd lack of actual surveys. I've been a member since last Fall, and have only received a handful of survey invitations. I've only qualified for one survey, and I got paid an unthrilling $1. The good thing is you can request payment even if you only have $1 in your account. The lifeblood of this site is referrals. You get paid more ($2) if one of your direct referrals takes a survey than if you take one yourself. However, I have referred a grand total of one person so far, and I don't think he's qualified for any surveys yet. If you want a very low-volume survey site to join, gimme some referral love. I think the link above works. If not, comment or email and I'll send you a link directly.

Ipsos I-say. I joined this one because I somehow thought they paid cash money. They don't seem to. I'm unwilling to take surveys simply for sweepstakes entries. No thanks.

MyPoints (Referral available by email or via comment form). This site sends surveys, but they mostly seem to be thinly veiled attempts to get you to sign up for newsletters etc. I usually bypass the surveys on here.

*Edited on 28 July to add Brand Institute, which I forgot about until today.