It's The Taking Part That Counts (yougov.com)

Member Name: I Like Blue

Product:	yougov.com
Date:	31/07/05 (461 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Being involved in polls and surveys and getting paid for it

Disadvantages: Sometimes not the answer there you want on the polls

Despite its official sounding name YouGov is a private venture aimed at gauging the opinions and thoughts of people from all walks of life (as long as you have an Internet connection) on a massive variety of issues and topics that affect our everyday lives.

YouGov is an Internet based polling site that very quickly established itself as a forerunner of public opinion polls after its inception about 5 years ago. YouGov’s credibility as a respected opinion pollster comes from some quite outstanding results notably being within 1% of the correct result of the 2001 UK General Election, an Australian General Election and even Pop Idol! As yougov is internet based only it can canvass opinion and obtain results to polls very quickly indeed.

I’m not going to bore you or insult your intelligence by describing to the smallest detail about the yougov website, instead I’ll give you an overview and hopefully, if you aren’t already a member, you’ll be interested enough to have a look for yourself.

The yougov website isn’t the most ‘hip’ website around but that really doesn’t matter; It’s clear, practical, quick to load and extremely easy to navigate. Registering is very quick and straightforward and once that’s done you can start getting fully involved…and earning money!

Once you’ve registered and you login you can make the required amendments to your profile page and the information you give there is only used to target polls to specific groups/individuals. The information asked for is the sort that is normally used by polling organisations to help obtain, as best as possible, a balanced demographic range of people to poll. This includes things like the job you do, the paper you read, the regional TV area you live in and your political leaning.

On the rest of the site there is plenty of information for the visitor, whether you are a member or not, and it is pretty comprehensive. As a prospective member though the most important thing to read, in my opinion, is the ‘Join Consumer Panel/How does it work?’ section which should answer nearly all the questions you might have about how yougov works.

The main area of the site is the ‘Take Part’ section, which is sub-divided into different areas from Music to Sports to Life to Current Affairs. Quite often there are polls to participate in within these areas but they are non-paying polls, they are for general interest only. Most of the polls here are can be quite in-depth and very often topical to events in the world at the time.

Right, on to the main reason that people want to join yougov - money! Yes, yougov pay you for your opinion, or rather mainly your participation in opinion polls. Apart from the £1 you receive for registering, yougov’s payment for completing opinion polls is generally 50p per poll. Often though the payment can be £1, sometimes it can be £2 and in the time I’ve been a member I’ve had a couple of £3 polls. In addition to paying polls yougov often have prize draw polls where instead of paying 50p or more for completing a poll, once completed you are entered into a cash prize draw of which the amounts can vary but normally it’s around the £500 mark and the prize is divided into 4 or 5 prize levels usually. As yet though I’ve never won anything in these prize draws.

The slight drawback with yougov is that you can only cash out once you’ve reached £50. When you’ve reached that amount payout is automatic, you don’t have to do a thing. YouGov send you an e-mail confirming you’ve reached £50 and a cheque will be sent to your registered address within 30 working days. Of course you can check your progress towards that magic £50 through your account page which lists all the polls you’ve participated in, in date order and the amounts earned for each poll with a running total at the bottom of the page.

I’ve been a member of YouGov since January 2002 and I finally hit the £50 mark in May this year and received my cheque within the 30 days as promised by yougov so no complaints there! Obviously though you’re not going to get rich quick with yougov but then for me that’s not why I joined them in the first place, although getting paid for my opinion is rather nice.

The paying polls are sometimes not too dissimilar to the non-paying, or open, polls in the Take Part section as I mentioned earlier. There are obviously very often more involved polls and the topic of each can vary. Thinking back I’d say the majority of polls I’ve participated in are political or current affairs based with the rest being made up of polls on lifestyle, social issues and there are quite a few consumer based polls. Generally each poll can take between 5 and 15 minutes to complete and very rarely do they take any longer.

Again thinking back over the time I’ve been a member of yougov there have been many enjoyable polls I’ve taken part in but I suppose one of the favourite polls, which ended up as a series of polls, that I was invited to take part in was from an unnamed company who had commissioned yougov to poll it’s members in the form of a general knowledge quiz. Each poll was a series of questions with multiple choice answers with the overall idea behind these polls was for a general knowledge quiz game similar to Trivial Pursuit. By polling a cross-section of yougov members in such a way then the company could gauge the ease or difficulty of the game they were planning. If I remember rightly I think I earned about £4 or £5 for that series of polls and enjoyed the quiz in the process!

The paying polls don’t appear on the main pages of the yougov site. One way to check for such polls is to login and check your account page; if there is a paying poll to take part in then there will be a link to it from here.

The other way to take part in paying polls, and this is the way I’ve always done it, is to check the ’Poll Alerts’ box on your profile page. Each time there is a paying poll then an invitation to take part is e-mailed to you with a deadline when the poll must be completed by. YouGov’s reputation and credibility as an opinion pollster is pretty much based on its ability to obtain and publish poll results very quickly indeed, so, often, invitations by e-mail to take part in polls have quite short deadlines indeed, usually a day or so. There have been occasions I’ve encountered where a poll was required to be completed on the same day the e-mail was sent! So, overall the e-mail alert system for polls is by far the best way to get the best out of yougov’s paying polls, else you’d probably only get to complete a few now and again if you logged into your account.

There is also a Polling Club option which, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure how that works as there is no identifiable difference between these kind of paying polls or other ones save perhaps they are generally a series of polls linked to each other over a short period of time, but then I’m really only guessing there, I could be wrong so if someone who knows could enlighten me I’d be grateful.

There are a couple of things that kind of trouble me about yougov though, but not in a sinister way. Being Internet based makes this kind of polling for public opinion a faceless task and to me it does require a certain amount of trust by yougov on the honesty of the people who sign up as members and contribute in the polls, so I often wonder if the results gained are completely representative. Something must be working right though because as I said earlier and as can be seen on the yougov site, in the results that mattered yougov’s polls were so close to the actual outcome.

My other kind of niggle if you like are the polls themselves. Now, I studied Sociology a couple of years ago and one of the fundamentals of gauging a society’s opinion is in the methodology of gaining that opinion. How often have you been presented with a poll with answer options only for you to think the answer I want isn’t there? In some ways this is how yougov’s polls are set out or the only ’other’ option is the answer ’don’t know’. Or sometimes there is an answer there that is sort of how you feel but you don’t feel it explains your full thoughts on the matter and there is nowhere to add that extra. In essence some of the poll question sets are what as known as ’closed questions’, basically ’yes’, ’no’ or ’don’t know’ with no option to expand on your given answer. However I have noticed recently there is an increase in the amount of polls where questions have a text box underneath where you can give a fuller answer.

On the whole though I really enjoy taking part and being part of something with yougov. I’ve often been watching programmes like Sky News or read newspapers where a yougov poll result is announced or published and I know I participated in that poll and I feel a kind of pride and satisfaction that my opinion mattered in some small way, especially as most polls are taken from a target group of about 1000 people or so.

I often think of yougov as somewhere between the lazy person’s protest site and multiple choice opinionating but I still can’t recommend it enough. I’m also a member of other survey sites such as PureProfile, Trendscan and MediaTransfer, but they don’t even come close to yougov and what it offers and the regularity of polls to take part in.

So, what are you waiting for? If you’re not already a member get across to yougov, register and start taking part!

Summary: A no frills appearance site that has plenty for you to get involved in.