Paid Survey Sites
UPDATE: 12-23-2008 OK, I downloaded and ran Malwarebytes on my Windows installation and discovered that it was infected by Trojandownloader as a result of participating in these surveys, so I'm recommending that you do not visit any of the survey sites on this page. Well, I'm taking that one step further, and disabling all of the links on this page, so you cannot go to any of these bad sites. There are three safe links on this page, and they connect to the Microsoft MVP web site, where you can get a hosts file, which will prevent your Internet applications from connecting to many bad sites on the web. Of course the other two links to other pages here on my web site are safe as well.

The list of survey sites on this page are free to join. Many ads will tell you that you can make thousands a month taking surveys and offer to sell you access to their database of sites that will "hire" you to take surveys. I've never paid their fee to join so I can't comment on how much you can make with them, but I can tell you that the following list of free to join sites have netted me about $300 in a year of taking surveys.

UPDATE: 11-30-2008 I have discovered that one of the sites listed on this page is listed in the hosts file which I use to block bad sites from loading in my browser. I got my hosts file from the Microsoft MVP web site, and they note the following about this one site's survey server

127.0.0.1 survey.otxresearch.com #[TrojanDownloader.OTXloader.A][MVPS.Criteria]

The server name appears first on the line, after the ip address 127.0.0.1, which means localhost and is used by a hosts file to redirect attempts to connect to a bad domain to nothing, then everything after the # sign are comments from the Microsoft MVP team about problems encountered with that server.

I must note that I have taken $100 worth of surveys from that server at a nickle a point, and an average of 40 points per survey if I qualify for that particular survey, which I often do not. In fact, I'm currently waiting on the second of two $50 checks I have earned by taking surveys from them. That is a lot of surveys!

In all that time I have noticed no peculiar behavior from my computer and I watch it like a hawk. I'm always watching the DSL lights to monitor traffic on my Internet connection, and the lights only flicker indicating traffic when I'm downloading mail, web pages, or files from the Internet. At all other times it is quiet.

Still, to be on the safe side, I will no longer take surveys from Global Test Market, and am currently getting ready to do a search through the hosts file for other survey sites listed on this page to see if they are listed as well, in the next few minutes.

OK, I have finished testing the sites listed on this page and found several more that were blocked by the Microsoft MVP hosts file. I have noted within their entries which ones they are.

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