Survey Junkie: Earn Small Amounts for Surveys & Data

What is Survey Junkie?

Survey Junkie is a marketing research firm that promises to pay you to take surveys and share digital browsing data on your smart phone.

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How it works

There are no requirements to sign up, other than being over the age of 18, having a pulse, an email address and a smart phone.

Then you can opt to participate in one of two ways — taking surveys, which will pay a few cents each; or sharing your personal data, which also provides a small monthly payout.

Survey Junkie review

Survey Junkie promises to pay you to take surveys. But it won’t pay much. The site estimates that you could earn up to $40 a month, if you take three surveys a day. In other words, in a best-case scenario, you’ll earn about 60 cents per survey. In our tests of the site, we found it more common to earn 10 cents to 25 cents per survey and, often as not, you could be disqualified from taking surveys once you answer a few screening questions.

So, this isn’t a big money-maker.

That said, the site doesn’t pretend otherwise. And the surveys are generally easy to take and can be done while you’re watching t.v. or hanging out in an airport.

The catch

The catch with any survey company is the same. You give up a lot of personal privacy for a few bucks. This company is not only looking for your opinions, it would like to get access to your browser history and location, too. All this information goes to marketing firms that use it to sell you products and services.

That said, lots of people are spying on you anyway. You have to be fairly aggressive about reading privacy policies and opting out of digital tracking, if you want to avoid companies tracking your every digital move anyway. Most of those companies don’t pay you for the privilege. If you don’t care about being digitally watched, this site at least gives you a way to make money from it.

Pay

During our tests of the site, the best we could do was earn just over $3.00 per hour. Given that most surveys offered four to five cents per minute, we think that’s as much as you can hope for. You can pick and choose your surveys to help optimize rates. But almost every survey that offered more than eight cents per minute quickly disqualified our reviewer.

Consumers can cash out their points for cash via PayPal or via e-gift cards once they’ve accumulated 500 points, worth $5.

 

The first questions for the majority of surveys involve demographic information. And, sometimes, just your demographics — age, ethnicity, gender, etc. — is enough to disqualify you.

We found that survey takers in more desirable or atypical demographic groups (parents with small children, for example) might have an advantage in finding more and better-paying surveys. If you’re from a group that doesn’t buy much — older people, for example — you’re likely to get bumped out of most of the surveys here.

The good news is that if you are going to be disqualified, the site normally boots you quickly. (This is in contrast to many survey sites that will ask 10 minutes of questions before saying you don’t qualify.) So you don’t waste a ton of time.

Recommendations:

Watch a lot of television and don’t mind giving out plenty of personal information during commercial breaks? By all means, sign up. We have nothing against this site, if you’re not doing it as a source of income. It can be a decent way to kill time when you’re stuck in the airport. You can sign up for Survey Junkie here.

If you want to share your opinions, but are hoping for higher pay, you may also want to sign up for focus groups through FieldWork or FindFocusGroups. These are not every-day sources of income. But, when you get assigned to a focus group, it generally pays well.

We also recommend Maven, UserInterviews, Respondent and (for medical related surveys and focus groups) Rare Patient Voice. All four of these sites ask more detailed questions for considerably more money. Rare Patient Voice, for example, pays an average of $120 per hour.

Want to sign up for Survey Junkie?

1. Click here to create an account
2. Verify your email
3. Start earning.

What their users say: (From Reddit)

“Ultimately it does take work and you are trading time for money so it’s just like a side job. Granted, it’s a side job you can complete while watching TV and not paying a lot of attention which is a bonus.”

“I used it last year (like December-ish) and I found it to be okay, I got a lot of annoying e-mails from them and didn’t qualify for much (that’s normal for me though). They did pay out.”

“I used it for a while, and I’d say I probably got about $30 out of it in Amazon cards for the month that I did it, but it’s a pretty bad time-to-cost ratio.”

Updated 1/26/2025