Get paid for what you already know

This is not a job and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Nobody replaces an income here. What the panel is good for is turning time you were going to spend on your phone anyway into money that arrives on a predictable schedule, from work that takes a real opinion rather than a click.

Pay is quoted per study, but the number that matters is what it works out to per hour. A two-dollar study that takes eight minutes pays better than a five-dollar study that takes forty, and only one of those is obvious from the invitation. So we show both, on every invitation, before you start.

• Consumer studies sit in the low single digits and run ten to twenty minutes. They arrive most often, and they are the bulk of what most members earn.
• Business studies pay several times more, because the audiences are rarer. If you make or influence purchasing decisions at work, this is where your time is worth the most.
• Screen-outs and full quotas pay a fixed amount. Less than a complete, but never nothing.
• Your balance does not expire and is not converted into anything else. It sits there until you withdraw it at $5.

First withdrawals wait 72 hours from signup, with a verified email address. That delay exists because most fraudulent accounts cash out and disappear inside a day, and a short wait removes their entire business model without costing an honest member anything except patience.

Screening questions decide whether you match the audience a client is paying for. Most of the time you will not, because most studies want a narrow slice of people and you cannot know which slice until you answer.

Somebody who read four screening questions carefully and turned out to own the wrong car spent real minutes doing it. Pay nothing for those minutes and you teach that person to stop reading — to guess at whatever answer sounds like it qualifies. That is how a panel ruins its own data, one unpaid screen-out at a time. The fixed screen-out payment is not generosity. It is the cheapest way we know to keep the answers honest.

Signing up does not mean answering fifty questions about yourself. You answer two or three, then a few more next week, then a few more after that. Some of them you will be asked again months later, worded differently.

Two reasons, and we would rather you hear both from us. The first is that people answer carefully when they are not racing through a wall of forms to reach the part that pays. The second is that asking the same thing twice, far apart and phrased differently, is how contradictions surface. A profile built slowly is a profile a client can rely on, which is what makes your completes worth paying for in the first place.

• Coach you into qualifying. No invitation will tell you which answer gets you in. A panel that hints is selling clients a room full of people pretending to be someone else.
• Withhold pay without naming why. "Violated the terms" is not a reason. If a reward is held you get the specific check that fired, the study it fired on, and a route to dispute it in front of a person.
• Hand your identity to clients. Clients receive answers and a respondent id. Your email address, your name and your device never travel with them.
• Charge you anything. There is no fee to join, no fee to withdraw and no upgrade that gets you better studies.

Read the rewards rules if you want the specifics on what holds a payment and how to challenge one. The step-by-step covers what actually happens between signing up and being paid, including the four ways a study can end. If you would rather see the answers to the questions people ask before joining, they are on the support page.

One honest caveat: invitation volume depends on who you are and where you live. Members in a rare business audience get fewer invitations that are worth much more. Members in a common consumer profile get the opposite. Neither is a problem with your account, and no amount of activity changes which one you are in.