Toluna Influencers Review: Is It Legit and Worth It?

Toluna Influencers might be worth signing up for if you like completing surveys and have already maxed out other sites that pay more, such as Swagbucks and InboxDollars.

However, there are other types of gigs that pay significantly more than survey websites. If money is your main concern, consider other popular side hustle ideas before you spend much time on Toluna (or any of its competitors).

How much can you realistically earn?

We tested Toluna Influencers for about 7 hours. Here’s what we found:

• Hourly rate: $1.28–$1.50*
• Average time to redeem rewards ($10): About 7 hours
• Time to get paid: 1–3 weeks
• Poll completion rate: 39%

*We’ve calculated the hourly rate and average time to redeem rewards with the signup bonus of about $0.17 included. Any pending rewards are excluded.

Here’s how our findings compare to what Toluna Influencers promises on their site:

Unfortunately, Toluna’s claims don’t really tally with our experience. If there really are surveys on their site worth $16.67, we suspect they’re few and far between.

How much you can earn per month

Toluna Influencers doesn’t give an estimate of how much you can earn per day, week, or month.

However, we’d say that given the hourly rate we calculated, you can realistically expect to make $30–$50 per month if you use the site for several hours every week.

Other pros and cons to consider

Try Toluna Influencers Today

Alternatives to Toluna Influencers

Toluna Influencers 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:

• Branded Surveys
• Forthright
• InboxDollars
• InstaGC
• LifePoints
• MyPoints
• Opinion Outpost
• Prime Opinion
• Swagbucks
• ySense
• Zap Surveys

On Toluna Influencers, you collect points to earn rewards.

How much are points worth on Toluna Influencers?

Toluna Influencers has a complicated points redemption system. The value of your points depends on how you redeem them and how many you redeem in one go.

That said, in general, you can exchange between 3,000 and 3,500 points for $1.

Breaking down the Toluna Influencers redemption system

Points you redeem via PayPal are worth less than points you redeem as gift cards, and saving up more points to get a bigger reward gives you a better exchange rate.

For example, we saw a $10 PayPal card for 35,000 points. With this redemption option, the exchange rate would have been 3,500 points per dollar. We also saw a $30 PayPal card for 95,000 points, which would have translated into 3,167 points per dollar.

Alternatively, you can get a $10 gift card for 30,000 points. Gift cards give a better exchange rate of 3,000 points per dollar.

How much do you need to earn to get paid?

To redeem your points in the form of a gift card, you need at least 30,000 points. To cash out via PayPal, you need 35,000.

How long does it take to get paid?

For most of the redemption options we checked on Toluna Influencers, the site said that you should allow 1–3 weeks to receive your rewards.

Is there a limit on how much you can earn?

No, there’s no limit on how much you can earn with Toluna Influencers. We never ran out of surveys to do while we were testing it (although we did struggle to qualify for most surveys).

There are several ways to earn points:

• Sign up
• Take surveys
• Vote in Sponsored Polls
• Play games
• Join community contests
• Become the Panelist of the Month
• Refer friends

Sign up

When you sign up for Toluna Influencers, you will likely have to enter the following information:

• What country you live in
• First name
• Last name
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Zip code
• Mobile phone number
• Which of the following categories you’re most interested in: shopping, sports, cars, or none of these

You’ll then enter your email, create a password, and verify your email address.

Once you enter the app, you’ll find profile surveys you can take to start earning. You may not have to do these to use the app, but they’re guaranteed points (and you can also update your profile survey answers sporadically to get more points).

Our experience

The whole Toluna Influencers signup process took us less than 2 minutes, and we got 500 points, equivalent to about $0.17—not great compared to the signup bonuses we’ve seen from other platforms.

Later, we also did the profile surveys that were available and earned 100 points for each one, as expected.

In total, there were 1,300 points’ worth of profile surveys available (equivalent to about $0.37–$0.43). As mentioned, these weren’t obligatory.

Take surveys

Toluna Influencers offers several types of surveys (although you may not always have all of these available on your dashboard).

You can refer to the table below for an overview of the different survey types you’ll likely find on Toluna Influencers. Note that we read conflicting information about the various types of surveys depending on whether we looked at the app or the desktop version of the site, so some small details may not be fully reliable.

You can see all of these survey types in the screenshot below.

Our experience

We completed 59 Toluna Influencers surveys altogether. Of these:

• The 13 profile surveys we did were successful and gave us 100 points each.
• 10 other types of surveys were successful and gave us points (although the points were still pending for one of these when we finished testing)
• 36 surveys were unsuccessful (kicking us out, telling us we didn’t qualify, or giving us error messages) and yielded no points.

A major downside of Toluna Influencers that we noted was the lack of consolation points for failed surveys (whereas other sites often give you a point or two for this).

Best survey experience 

The best survey we took gave us 2,500 points for 3 minutes, equivalent to a rate of about $16.67 per hour.

Worst survey experience

The worst survey we took was one that we spent 8 minutes on, but then it stopped working and we received no points for our efforts.

Vote in Sponsored Polls

Toluna Influencers offers Sponsored Polls, which consist of a single question you can answer to get 15 points (equivalent to about 0.4–0.5 cents) each time. They’re not very lucrative, but they take only a few seconds, so you might as well do them.

Our experience

We voted in Sponsored Polls 15 times and earned 15 points each time.

Play games

Toluna Influencers will usually have a few different games you can play, including:

• Toluna Music Trivia: This appears to be a game where you identify songs to win virtual scratch cards that offer points as prizes.
• Memory Game: This is like the card game “Pairs,” where you have to turn over two cards at a time and try to find pairs of cards with matching images.
• Arcade games: These are games like Pacman and Pinball. Toluna Influencers says that you can win 2,500 points or more on their arcade games. However, the games cost you points to play, so this is essentially gambling.
• Spin the Wheel: This is a spin-to-win wheel that offers you the chance to win up to 1,000 points. You don’t have to pay any points to play this game.

Our experience

We didn’t try out any of the Toluna Arcade games (which include Beer Pong, Pacman, and Pinball).

However, we played a few rounds of the memory game. This didn’t give us any points.

We also attempted the Toluna Music Quiz a few times—a weekly music quiz you can play to earn virtual scratch cards. The first few times, we couldn’t get it to work. The last time we tried, it worked, and were able to answer several music trivia questions (although the virtual scratch card we won didn’t yield any points).

Finally, we spun the Toluna Influencers wheel five times. On one spin, we won 40 points—the smallest prize available—but four out of five times we won nothing. This made us suspect that the wheel was rigged (as the chances of winning points more than once within five spins would have been around 99.9% if the wheel was completely random).

Join community contests

Toluna Influncers will usually have puzzles that you can solve to win points. Look for these under “Community” in the main menu (and then click “Contests”).

Toluna Influencers doesn’t state how often new puzzles are published on the site.

Our experience

We saw a couple of different contests on Toluna Influencers while we were testing. One was called “4Pictures1Word,” and it challenged you to work out which word linked four different pictures. We also saw a puzzle called “Unfold the Mystery,” for which we had to identify the subject of a zoomed-in image.

These puzzles offered a chance to win 1,000 points for finding the right answer (although it was very easy to copy everyone else’s answers). There were 5 winners for each game; sadly, we weren’t among them.

Become the Panelist of the Month

If, in the course of a month, you get more points than any other Toluna Influencers user in your country, you can win their “Panelist of the Month” award. If you win, you’ll get double points for each survey you completed during that month.

Our experience

At first, we couldn’t work out how to sign up for the Panelist of the Month contest. You should be able to sign up under “Rewards” in the main menu, where website users are directed to a button they can click on “below.” However, the button was unavailable the first time we checked, so you may not always be able to find this.

When we returned to the page at a later date, a “sign up” button had appeared that we were able to use. It’s possible that you can only sign up for Panelist of the Month at certain times, but we couldn’t find any information about this.

Refer friends

Toluna Influencers says you get 500 bonus points (equivalent to about $0.17) for every friend you refer to Toluna Influencers if they sign up successfully. You can invite up to 10 people per month.

Our experience

We tried out this feature, and we got a pleasant surprise as we received 1,000 points when our friend signed up.

Toluna Influencers offers three different points redemption methods: PayPal, gift cards, and charity donations. As we’ve already mentioned, they say that you should allow up to 3 weeks to receive your rewards.

PayPal

PayPal was one of the redemption options we saw on Toluna Influencers, but it had a less favorable exchange rate than retailer gift cards.

It was possible to exchange 35,000 points for $10 in PayPal credit or 95,000 for $30 in PayPal credit. On the other hand, we were able to exchange 30,000 for a $10 gift card (and that exchange rate also held for more valuable cards).

Gift cards

Most of the Toluna Influencers redemption options we saw were gift cards. The featured retailers included:

• Amazon
• Walmart
• Starbucks
• Sephora
• Target
• Gap, Inc.
• The Cheesecake Factory
• Chili’s
• Kohl’s

We tried to redeem our rewards as a $10 Starbucks card. However, we still hadn’t received our gift card after 12 days, so we sent a message to their customer service team using a form on the Toluna website. Customer service didn’t respond, so we messaged them again through the app; this time, they responded promptly and sent us a new card.

Unfortunately, the card Toluna sent didn’t work, and we had to email them yet again. They then sent us a link to activate our gift card, and we finally got it to work.

Donate your points to charity

Toluna Influencers offers the option to donate your points to charity. The charities you can choose from may vary.

We didn’t try this feature, but we saw several options when we checked. We were able to donate to:

• Fund the French Red Cross (including help for earthquake survivors in Morocco)
• Plant a tree in Madagascar
• Offer four meals to kids
• Remove 100 grams of plastic from the ocean

The last three options above are associated with a platform called allcolibri, which allows companies to support good causes.

Notably, the redemption thresholds for these charity donations were lower than for other redemption options (starting from 1,000 points, equivalent to about $0.33).