Thursday 1 November 2012

Review of Toluna


Toluna evolved from Ciao and other well known companies. It is big, has many survey participants to choose from and many clients ordering survey results. It claims to have members in 39 countries, while the rewards are posted from France. Toluna uses its market leading position to pay tiny rewards for the surveys. They disguise it with a massive amount of points given even for 10 minutes work. Often they would send invites for a 7 minutes survey rewarding 1800 points. The points have no monetary value and can be exchanged for high street vouchers, amazon credits or similar. Thus Toluna saves on average 5% more from the retailers it buys these vouchers.

80000 points give £15 in a Love2Shop high street vouchers, making a 1800 survey worth £0.33 + the inconvenience to use vouchers. The vouchers expire after some time and as I ordered several a long time ago, it became urgent for me to use them. I looked at the retailers logos and hurried to Focus DIY to buy something. However, Focus DIY went into administration and disappeared from the retail space. I thought that I could always find something useful at Woolworths, which also accepted these vouchers. The Woolworths met the same fate as Focus and was no longer available. I turned to Peacocks, which I could find absolutely everywhere, but Peacocks went into administration as well, was sold to another company and stopped accepting any vouchers. The Comet went the same way. The best I could do, was to buy some cleaning materials, which I didn't really need, at Wilkinson and get maximum cash value from these vouchers - £1. This is the maximum amount given in change.

Those, who complain about the long time until the rewards are credited and then even longer time until the vouchers arrive - don't worry, at the end credits will appear and vouchers will arrive. It is all part of the process to spend as little as possible and to delay any payments as long as possible.

Apparently, Toluna does have a problem to find enough respondents for their low paid surveys. They keep sending invites with headers like, "We've got a fun & interactive survey", "Here's your chance to voice your opinion!", "You've still got some time left to give your opinion".‏ When nothing helps and they can't find enough respondents to fill in a 40 minutes survey for a few pennies, they would subcontract this survey to another survey company, pay decent rewards and get enough respondents.

Once in a while one could get a survey with a decent reward. Still, the electricity and broadband used to fill in Toluna surveys might cost more than the reward itself.