Ok, I’m getting sick of some online survey sites.  There are some that seem decent, like E-Poll that are pretty decent.  They’re surveys can sometimes get a little long and/or boring, but you usually can complete them and get points for them, and save up the points for a nice gift card for Best Buy or Amazon or someplace.

And then there are some like SurveySavvy or GamersInstinct that just drive me nuts.  I can’t recall a SurveySavvy survey that I actually got to do.  Most of the time, I don’t meet their demographic within the first 15 seconds.  And with GamersInstinct, I usually try to take the survey after they have “met their quota.”  Well today, I caught the invite email from GamersInstinct within minutes of it being mailed to me.  I thought “ah hah, here’s my chance!”

So I go to take it, and it starts.  I’m in before the quota.  I go through it for probably 3-4 minutes, and answer about 20 web page screens of questions.  It appears, as the questioning gets a little more focused, that it is a survey about racing games.  Not my favorite genre, but one I’ve dabbled in here or there.  Well finally, after all that time, I answered some question in some way they didn’t like, and I got some message like “Sorry, but you don’t meet our demographic.”  WTF??  Give me some site credit for spending all that time filling out your freaking survey, or don’t expect me to do another one in the future!  That’s just F’ed up.

Maybe these survey sites should take the time to establish the demographics of their survey invitees BEFORE sending out surveys, so they could narrow the focus of their invites, instead of making someone spend all that time on individual surveys, only to be told that they won’t be compensated for it.  Filling out a survey for you, so you can use the information to make money from a client, is not something I’m going to do just because I’m a nice guy.  Maybe they should send me a survey about how crappy their survey methods are.  Then again, I probably wouldn’t fit their demographic.