August 12, 2024
Editorial Guidelines
Experts in this article:
Anastasia is a Software QA Tester with 3+ years of hands-on experience performing different types of testing not limited to...
Jessica is a writer for SideHustles.com. Her side hustles include freelance academic writing and editing, which she's done for...
Branded Surveys is a market research platform where you can complete surveys and earn money for sharing your opinions and other information about yourself.
It’s one of several survey apps you can use to make money on your phone from the comfort of your own home. But is it worth your time, or are there better options?
Here’s what we found.
Branded Surveys may be worth using if you have free time to burn and don’t want to try a more conventional side hustle that could pay more.
We tested the app for 4 hours, and here’s what we earned.
*Our calculations of the hourly rate and average time to redeem rewards included the $1 sign-up bonus.
$1.47 isn’t great money, but for some, it might still be worth it.
Bear in mind that our earnings represent just one tester. If you look around the web, you’ll find reports of people earning more or even less, but we suggest taking random internet comments with a grain of salt.
Here’s how our findings stack up against the claims on Branded Surveys’ own site:
| What Branded Surveys says | What we found |
|---|---|
| $0.50 to $5 per survey | $0.05 to $1.05 per survey |
| It’ll take you a couple hours per week to earn $50 to $100 | It’ll take you a couple hours per day to earn $50 to $100 |
Unfortunately, we found that Branded Surveys significantly exaggerates your earning potential. You can earn real money on the site, but not as much money as they say.
Branded Surveys isn’t the only game in town. If you’re interested in learning about other platforms that will pay you to take surveys and complete other small tasks, check out our reviews of:
On Branded Surveys, you earn money by gaining points in app.
Each point is worth 1 cent, so you need 100 points to earn $1.
To get paid on Branded Surveys, you need at least 500 points, equivalent to $5.
Once you’ve decided to withdraw money from Branded Surveys, how quickly you’ll get paid depends on how active you are on the platform. Your payment may be processed:
We didn’t run out of surveys at any point while we were testing, and there are users on the leaderboard earning thousands of points a day, which suggests that they’re doing a hundred surveys per day or more. This means you’re unlikely to run out of surveys to earn rewards with.
Here are the ways you can earn points with Branded Surveys:
Branded Surveys currently advertises a $1 sign-up bonus, which we found to be accurate. The sign-up process involves three steps.
Signing up took about 4 minutes in total. By the end, we received 100 points (worth $1) for signing up. This is decent, but it’s not the best sign-up bonus we’ve seen.
Once you’ve signed up and found your way into the site, you’ll probably see something like this on the dashboard if you’re using the website:
Underneath this screen, you will find additional options, which may include:
| Survey Type | Definition | Our Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Normal surveys | The majority of the surveys you’ll take, which have no special label. | Most of the surveys we did were normal surveys. Some took a few minutes, while others took as long as half an hour. |
| Premium surveys | Surveys that offer higher points than normal. | While these do offer higher point returns in general, we didn’t manage to get any points from the ones we took, and we also noticed normal surveys with higher points totals. |
| Profile surveys | These unlock additional surveys. | These only took a couple of minutes each and paid out 5 points—not the best rewards, but these surveys never failed. |
| Insights survey | These are a way to share your opinion for easy points. | We only did one of these. It was quite long (it took us 27 mins) and only gave us 14 points, so we weren’t impressed. |
| Survey circuit | These give you a series of rapid-fire questions to unlock a survey. | We tried three of these. One got stuck (wasting 6 minutes for zero rewards), and another was over an hour long, so we backed out. However, the last one was good, giving us 60 points in 6 minutes. |
| TV studies | These surveys ask about TV shows you’ve watched. | We didn’t do any of these. |
| Other studies related to your interests | You might also see other specialized survey categories related to interests you’ve demonstrated in your previous answers. However, Branded Surveys doesn’t share details of which categories it offers. | We didn’t get offered any of these. |
Out of 25 surveys we took:
Best survey experience: $9/hr
The best survey we took was one that paid us 105 points in 7 minutes (which translates to 15 points per minute or $9 per hour).
Worst survey experience: $0.31/hr
The worst surveys we took were one that paid us only 14 points in 27 minutes (which translates to about 0.52 points per minute or $0.31 per hour) and one that got stuck after 6 minutes, meaning that we didn’t earn any points at all for it.
Daily Polls are single questions that show up on your survey feed on a daily basis. They’re extremely quick to answer.
Overall, they’re an easy way to earn a small number of points per day.
We took the Daily Poll eight times. It took about a minute each time and earned us 5 points per completion. Unlike surveys, it never failed.
You can earn 50 points when you invite someone to Branded Surveys and they complete enough surveys to earn a Silver badge. In other words, they have to complete 12 surveys in the space of a calendar month.
We didn’t test this. However, given how frequently surveys boot you out, it may be a tall order to convince a friend to sign up and complete 12 surveys unless they have a lot of free time and patience. (Simply asking a friend for $0.50 might be far easier.)
After you complete two surveys, you’ll gain access to the Branded Elite rewards program.
This program lets you gain additional benefits by graduating your account through three membership tiers: Bronze, Silver, and Gold.
Those benefits include:
Branded Surveys offers the following image to explain the program.
However, you need more detail to truly understand it. Here’s what we found:
1. Branded Surveys defines a “month” by what the calendar shows, not your account registration date.
Example: If you complete two surveys on October 31 and then eight surveys on November 1, you still won’t qualify for Silver even though that constitutes ten surveys total. You would still need to do two more surveys in November (for a total of ten that month) to qualify.
2. You move up a tier immediately when you reach the monthly threshold for the new tier.
Example: If you do 10 surveys in November, you’ll receive a Bronze badge immediately after two surveys, and then the Silver badge immediately when you complete eight more.
3. Once you receive a Badge, you keep it until the end of the following month.
Example: If you complete two surveys in October, you’ll qualify for Bronze until November 30.
4. You’ll get 5%–19% worth of bonus points at the end of any week when you do 12+ surveys (depending on which badge you’ve earned).
Example: Say you created a new account at the end of January and you completed 6 surveys before the end of the month. You then took another 6 surveys right at the beginning of February. You’d have gotten Bronze rewards for those 12 surveys, meaning you’d have earned 5% extra points for each one. (You wouldn’t have graduated to Silver yet, as you hadn’t completed 10 surveys in either January or February.)
While we managed to graduate our account to Silver, we never received any bonuses (because we never completed more than 12 surveys in a week).
Beware as you’re using the app that surveys will appear to give you bonus points. But if you look closely, there’s a padlock next to the bonus points, meaning you haven’t actually earned them until you meet further requirements.
Overall, the Branded Elite program is quite confusing, the website lacks detailed explanations, and customer service didn’t clear up our questions.
In addition, you need to be really committed to filling in surveys because the program only counts the ones you complete, which we’ve already said is often impossible to do.
The Branded Surveys website offers extra opportunities to win bonus points by qualifying for their leaderboard.
If you reach the leaderboard on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, you may receive an automatic 50–300 bonus points.
Here’s how that breaks down:
| Position on Leaderboard | Time Awarded | Automatic Points | Added to winners’ accounts… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 50 | Each day | 50 | Every day for the previous day’s activities. |
| Top 50 | Each week | 200 | Each Sunday for the previous week’s activity |
| Top 20 | Each month | 300 | On the 1st of the month for the previous month’s activities |
We didn’t qualify for the leaderboard, and we didn’t try.
If you’re not motivated to answer dozens of surveys a day to make the leaderboard, don’t worry. Branded Surveys may still award you bonus points via their Random Winner drawing.
To qualify, you just have to be an active Branded Elite member (i.e., complete more than two surveys a month).
Every time you complete a survey, you’ll get entered into daily, weekly, and monthly drawings. The more surveys you do, the greater the number of entries you’ll get for these drawings.
A randomly selected Branded Elite member can receive up to:
If you win, you should see the bonus points automatically appear in your account (on the “My Points” page).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we didn’t have much luck in this department. We didn’t win any bonus points during our testing sessions.
Overall, you’ll need at least 500 points (worth $5) to redeem your earnings on Branded Surveys.
There are four main ways to redeem your points. They all cost the same in terms of points per dollar, but some have lower minimum redemption amounts than others.
For this option, you’ll need to link your PayPal account to your Branded Surveys account by logging in to your PayPal, then confirming that you want to use PayPal for your payout.
You’ll also need to verify your email address and home address to successfully withdraw.
To make a bank transfer, you’ll have to use Plaid, which is a service that helps you deposit payments into your bank account.
To get your rewards as a bank transfer, follow the link under “Bank Transfer” on the payout options page.
Most of the redemption methods come in the form of gift cards. We counted about 180 options to choose from.
Some examples include:
Once you’ve chosen your preferred option, Branded Surveys will deliver a virtual gift card to your email within three business days. 2
After Branded Surveys approves your point withdrawal, choose the charity payout option.
You can then go through and decide which charity you would like to donate to. Branded Surveys processes the donations to the charity of your choice through Tango Cards within two days of your redemption approval.
When you make a charitable donation, remember to document it for potential tax deductions.
We respect your time. We’ll never recommend a service that we believe will waste it. To determine whether Branded Surveys is a good way to make money, we:
If you have more questions or concerns about our methods, please contact us.
Anastasia is a Software QA Tester with 3+ years of hands-on experience performing different types of testing not limited to functional, UI, ad-hoc, smoke, API, and regression testing for both web and mobile applications. She brings her extensive knowledge of QA to analyze gig apps for SideHustles.com.
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