review: chacha can dance on out of my life

What is ChaCha? It's a free cell phone service that answers any question texted by the user. Questions like, "What does an adult gorilla weigh?" or "Are ramen noodles healthy?" or even "What's your motherf****** problem motherf*****???" are not uncommon. ChaCha makes their money serving up ads in all of their response texts. I will not be doing any work for this company.

I signed on with ChaCha as a Vetter. A Vetter looks at all of the possible answers submitted by ChaCha Guides and chooses the most appropriate to text back to the client. If there is no acceptable answer the Vetter uses a search tool provided by ChaCha to find the correct response.

I spent nearly 30 minutes watching orientation videos at "ChaCha University" and then another 30 minutes taking a qualification test vetting answers. Unfortunately the test offered NO answers from Guides for me to vet on any of the 10 questions, I had to look up all of the answers myself. Searching and crafting an answer took from 1-3 minutes per question. And what is the pay rate? One half cent per question, that's right $00.005. Half of a freakin' penny. Even if one could answer a question every 30 seconds that's only 1 cent per minute, or 60 cents per hour. No thanks.

I wasted an hour of my life dancing around with ChaCha and I will never get those sixty minutes back. Don't make the same mistake I did, look for other options like MTurk, Tellwut, and Swagbucks to earn extra cash and gift cards online.

review: opinion square is just ok

I've been a member of Opinion Square for 35 days and in that time I've earned 2800 points - one $10.00 CVS gift card costs 2500 points but I haven't redeemed anything yet. In addition to merchandise, Opinion Square offers gift cards for Starbucks, Amazon, iTunes, Applebees, TGI Friday's, AMC Theatres, Bass Pro Shops, KMart, Cabela's, O'Charley's, and more.

I enjoy taking surveys but I'm on the fence about Opinion Square. They often send me email alerts that a study is available, and when I click the link I'm informed that I've already taken the survey (I would estimate that this happens 70% of the time). This drives me nuts, I wish they would stop.

The other thing that's irritating and a time sucker is that you must first qualify for many of the surveys. So you take a pre-survey only to find out you don't qualify for the real survey, and often the pre-survey questions ask for information that Opinion Square already has about you. When a member doesn't qualify for a survey they are given a consolation token - tokens are spent on a game that awards additional points, generally 25 points at a time. Personally, I'd rather they did away with the pre-qual surveys altogether.

Here is a screenshot of my account activity since I signed up on Oct. 11:

You can see that I've completed eight surveys (none more than 10 minutes long) and I have won points with the consolations tokens that I received.

I should mention that Opinion Square offers software for download that they say increases the surveys that are offered. The software is not available for Mac so I can't use it. I'm reluctantly going to stick with Opinion Square for now, I'll continue to track my earnings and decide if I feel my membership is worth it over the next few months.

mini review: my wife loves swagbucks

My wife has been an avid SwagBucks user for over a year now and she's earned more than $150 in Paypal gift cards in that time. Mainly she uses the search toolbar and earns points for everything she searches for, but she also watches videos for points, answers surveys, and prints coupons through the site (she's an extreme coupon user).

I must admit SwagBucks is not for me, I prefer the google search engine and haven't been very interested in poking around the SB site. To each their own - my better half can't stand Tellwut! There's no question that SwagBucks is one of the most trusted, popular, and well-known paid sites out there. If you'd like to give it a try you can sign up for free here.

mini review: thoughts on tellwut

I started using the survey site Tellwut on 10/11/12. The surveys are very quick (generally 1-5 questions) and reward points that can be redeemed for gift cards and merchandise. I signed up to help pay for Christmas presents this year and have decided to redeem my points in Amazon cards. I spend about 10 minutes a day completing the new surveys that are posted (I'm going to start timing myself and add that info to my spread sheet). Here are my stats so far:

10/11/12 joined site
11/4/12 redeemed $10 Amazon gift card
11/9/12 redeemed $10 Amazon gift card

Tellwut also offers gift cards for Home Depot, Walmart, Best Buy, and other brick and mortar stores, I'm hoping they will offer a Paypal option soon. Surveys reward between 5-10 points (business surveys will earn you 15). You can also create surveys to earn points. It takes 4000 points for a $10 gift card, which works out to 5 cents per 20 points. The surveys only take a few seconds each and so far I'm happy with what the rewards for what little work I've put in.

Tellwut gives you 100 free points just for signing up, click to join here.