August 12, 2024
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Experts in this article:
Sophia is a software QA Tester and web developer with experience testing multiple survey and task apps. She has two years of...
Jessica is a writer for SideHustles.com. Her side hustles include freelance academic writing and editing, which she's done for...
Ipsos iSay is an online survey rewards site where you can take market research surveys to get rewards, including gift cards and virtual prepaid cards. You can also donate your earnings to charity.
Ipsos iSay is run by Ipsos, which is a global market research and consulting firm headquartered in Paris. Ipsos is a legitimate company, but is its survey site worth signing up for?
We sent our professional tester to find out.
Ipsos iSay isn’t the best-paying rewards site we’ve tried, but it has several advantages, the most notable being the low minimum redemption threshold. This means you won’t have to wait too long to redeem your first rewards.
Ipsos iSay also works in countries other than the US, so it’s a good option if you want a site you can use while you’re traveling.
We tested Ipsos iSay for about 3 hours. Here’s what we earned.
| Hourly rate | Average time to redeem rewards ($5) | Time to get paid | Poll completion rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1.88 | 3 hours | Up to 4 weeks | 47% |
An hourly rate of $1.88 isn’t great. For context, there are similar platforms that offer upwards of $4 per hour (read our review of InboxDollars to learn about one of them).
Ipsos iSay doesn’t give an average figure for how much their surveys pay. The most lucrative survey our tester did paid 100 points (equivalent to about $1).
Ipsos iSay also doesn’t say how much users can earn per day, week, or month. Based on our tester’s findings, we would estimate that casual users can expect to earn about $5 a week, or $20–$25 per month.
Despite the somewhat low rates on Ipsos iSay, the platform may still be worth using, at least for some people. We’ll elaborate on this below.
On Ipsos iSay, you collect points, which you can cash in for rewards.
Ipsos iSay has a fairly intuitive system for points redemption. You need 500 points to get a $5 gift card. Put another way, if you choose to cash your points out in the form of a gift card, 1 point is worth 1 cent.
If you redeem your points as PayPal credit, you get a slightly less favorable exchange rate, as you need 510 points for $5 in credit, meaning that 1 point is worth 0.98 cents.
The lowest-value gift card you can get is worth $5, meaning you need a minimum of 500 points to cash out on Ipsos iSay—unless you choose to donate your rewards to charity.
If you opt to make a charitable donation instead of cashing out your points yourself, you need a minimum of 200–210.
Ipsos iSay says that gift cards and prepaid cards are delivered instantly to your email. 1 PayPal payments are slower; Ipsos iSay says that they may take up to 4 weeks.
In our case, it only took a couple of days to get paid.
In theory, there’s no limit on how much you can earn from Ipsos iSay, and we didn’t run out of surveys at any point while we were testing.
However, we have seen online reports from users saying they had problems with survey availability, finding that there were only 5–10 surveys available per day (or even fewer). If this is the case for you, it will limit how much you can earn on any given day.
The number of surveys you get may depend on your demographic, as advertisers tend to target certain groups of people more than others.
Here are the tasks you can do to earn rewards on Ipsos iSay:
Before you can do any of that, you’ll need to sign up, which we’ll describe below. Unfortunately, you won’t directly earn rewards for doing so, as Ipsos iSay doesn’t provide a signup bonus (a black mark against them, as many of their competitors offer bonuses, which can be as high as $5).
To sign up for Ipsos iSay, you have to provide the following:
You then have to verify your email account.
Finally, you have to complete your profile by answering several questions about yourself and your household. You also have to provide your phone number.
It took us a couple of minutes to sign up for Ipsos iSay. Unfortunately, as mentioned, there’s no signup bonus, so we didn’t earn anything for our endeavors.
When you first start using Ipsos iSay, you’ll probably have to start with several “Profiling Surveys” before you can do anything else (we couldn’t see any other available surveys before we completed these).
Profiling Surveys have questions that are designed to help Ipsos iSay select normal surveys that will be suitable for you.
These initial surveys cover many different topics, such as travel, personal care, technology, and more. They’re not very long, but you don’t get any points for doing them (another black mark, as many other survey sites give you points for this type of survey).
Once you’ve completed enough Profiling Surveys, normal surveys (with actual rewards) should start to appear under the “Surveys” tab.
We completed all of the Profiling Surveys on Ipsos iSay. They took us just a minute or two each—about 10 minutes in total—but we didn’t get any points for our hard work.
In addition, we completed 15 normal surveys, of which:
While we were taking surveys, one problem we noticed was that Ipsos iSay gave inaccurate predictions regarding how many points their surveys would pay.
On most of the other sites we’ve tested, once we qualified for a survey (which, admittedly, didn’t happen as frequently as we’d have liked—the surveys on many of these sites are disappointingly scanty), we were awarded the exact number of points that the site estimated we’d get. This wasn’t the case on Ipsos iSay.
Best survey experience:
The best survey we took on Ipsos iSay awarded us 75 points and took 7 minutes to complete. This is equivalent to a rate of about $6.43 per hour.
(Our highest-earning survey awarded us 100 points, but it took a very long time to complete, translating to a much lower effective hourly rate.)
Worst survey experience:
The worst survey we took on Ipsos iSay was our very first one; it paid us just 5 points for about 3 minutes of work. This is equivalent to a rate of about $1 per hour.
Ipsos iSay has weekly contests you can enter to win prizes, such as high-value gift cards. You can find these competitions under the “Rewards” tab on the Ipsos iSay website or app.
We entered a contest called “Winter Feast Trivia” twice to win a $200 Amazon gift card. To enter, we had to answer questions about holiday foods.
Unfortunately, we didn’t win anything.
Previously, Ipsos iSay would offer 100 points for every friend you referred (if they filled out their profile and completed at least one survey).
We weren’t able to find the friend referral function, so we contacted customer service. They quickly responded saying that the feature is no longer active.
There are at least four different methods you can use to claim your rewards on Ipsos iSay:
You may also be able to use your points to pay for merchandise in the Ipsos iSay catalog. However, we didn’t test this option, and Ipsos iSay didn’t provide detailed information about it.
You can cash out your Ipsos iSay points as PayPal credit. Compared with the platform’s other redemption options, it gives you a slightly less favorable exchange rate.
Ipsos’s PayPal redemption options are listed in the table below.
| PayPal Credit | Points Required |
|---|---|
| $5 | 510 |
| $15 | 1530 |
| $25 | 2550 |
The Ipsos iSay site has contradictory information about how long PayPal withdrawals take. On some pages on the site, it says that these payments take 1–3 weeks; on others, it says payments take 3–4 weeks.
We attempted to redeem our own Ipsos iSay points for PayPal credit. Surprisingly, we weren’t asked to link our PayPal account to our Ipsos iSay account, as usually happens during the process of redeeming rewards on sites like these.
After a few days, when we hadn’t received our PayPal payment, we contacted customer service. They responded quickly and explained that we should have signed up for Ipsos iSay with an email address that has a PayPal account associated with it.
They advised us to go to our Ipsos iSay profile (under “My Account”) and add a new email address where we can receive PayPal payments. We were able to do this relatively easily, and we then received our PayPal payment after just a couple of days.
The moral of the story is that, if you want to redeem your Ipsos iSay rewards via PayPal, you should make sure your Ipsos iSay email is also your PayPal email. If you’ve signed up with a different email address, you’ll need to change it or add a new one (in your Ipsos profile) to use this redemption option.
The gift card redemption options available on Ipsos iSay seem to rotate, as we saw different retailers available on different occasions.
Among the retailers we saw were:
As we’ve already mentioned, you need 500 points for a $5 gift card. There are also cards available in higher denominations (e.g., $10 or $25).
Ipsos iSay also allows you to collect your rewards in the form of virtual prepaid cards. You can use these to shop online or add them to your mobile wallet or digital payment services to use in physical stores that allow contactless payments.
When we checked the Ipsos iSay rewards options, we saw only one type of prepaid card on offer: a virtual prepaid Visa card (in $10 and $25 denominations).
If you’re in a giving mood, you can also donate your points to charity. The Ipsos iSay platform allowed us to donate:
We didn’t test out either of these options. However, with the first one, it seems that you get a code you can then convert into points to spend in the Ipsos iSay market catalog, which features dozens of charities you can donate to (e.g., the Humane Society, the US Peace Corps, US Hurricane Relief Fund Inc., etc.).
The Ipsos iSay catalog also offers various merchandise, such as clothes, electronics, and appliances. If you can convert your points to catalog credit, you may be able to spend it on items other than charity donations. However, we didn’t attempt to do this, so we aren’t sure that it’s possible.
In contrast to the somewhat convoluted process of donating to third-party charities, giving your points to the Ipsos Foundation is simpler; you simply click on “Order now” and then enter a few details to redeem your reward.
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