Maxion Research: Is It a Legitimate Side Hustle?

Recent help-wanted advertisements offering generously paid part-time work convinced SideHusl.com‘s editors to look into Maxion Research. Is this a lucrative side hustle site as they’d like you to believe? Or is it just another work-at-home con, as some are saying on Reddit? Here’s what we found.

What is Maxion Research?

Maxion Research has recently been advertising for part-time research study personnel, offering pay of up to $3,000 per study. The site gives the impression that it is a research firm that’s going to pay you this money. But it is not.

It’s actually a referral service that collects affiliate fees from other research sites that it works with. A few of these sites offer generous payments for study participants. That’s the fuel for the site’s pay promises.

Why does that matter?

Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with referring people to other job sites rather than offering jobs yourself. Sites like Indeed and HigherEdJobs do this to great effect, creating one-stop shopping for thousands of potential jobs.

But, if you use a go-between to find gigs, you should make sure that the go-between site isn’t surreptitiously harming you in any way. And here’s where Maxion Research raises red flags.

How it works

When you sign up with Maxion, you must accept its terms, which state that you’re at least 18, agree to site-visit recording by TrustedForm and Jornaya (consent verification companies). And you agree to receive relevant emails from Maxion Research.

You also consent to receiving sales calls and text messages at the numbers you provide them, even if you’re on a federal or state Do Not Call Registry.

The site will also prompt you to click to sign up for a half-dozen other survey/research companies, including Branded Surveys, YouGov, and SurveyJunkie. But that’s not required to sign up.

Maxion Research review

Maxion is a “lead generation” referral service, not a research service. So all of the research studies offered through this site are actually operated by someone else. Maxion simply gets paid to send you to these other sites.

But, signing up at the site forces you to give Maxion permission to spam you with all sorts of advertising.

This is, by the way, the reason you’re also required to give the site permission to track you through Jornaya and TrustedForm.

These services verify that you accepted the site’s terms, including those that specifically stated that they’re going to send you unsolicited advertisements. That prevents you from suing when you claim that they violated the Do Not Call Registry. Because they specifically told you that they would. You just may not have noticed that in the fine print when you signed up.

Research studies

That said, Maxion does list dozens of real research studies on its site. If you’re interested in any of these, you click on them, which will send you to a third-party site that’s actually conducting the research. No research is being done by Maxion itself.

When we tested the site in late July, the vast majority of studies that Maxion advertised were conducted by L&E Research. However, a handful of studies were offered by other companies, including Day1Labs, which sponsors clinical trials, and Ath Power Consulting, which enlists mystery shoppers.

The research studies advertised on Maxion’s site promise lucrative payments. But whether you’ll ever qualify to participate in any of these studies is unclear. And the studies are not conducted by Maxion. So Maxion has neither the means nor the obligation to make sure that you do.

Pay

Maxion also doesn’t pay you. If you get paid, it will be from a third-party research service that Maxion referred you to. Maxion is not involved in whether you land a paid research study or whether the company pays you after you complete it.

Recommendations

If you sign up with this site, we’d highly recommend that you do so with a phone number that can block or silence unknown callers. (On an iPhone, you can do this by going to “settings,” clicking on “apps” and then “phone.” Scroll to the bottom and hit “silence unknown callers.”) This will cut down on the need to answer a litany of sales calls. You can sign up with Maxion here.

Or, a better answer is to sign up with the research companies themselves and skip Maxion altogether.

Some legitimate research firms that we’d recommend include Respondent, UserInterviews, WinnWinn Research, Maven, Rare Patient Voice and L&E Research.