Lightspeed Onlinesurvey Review
Lightspeed Online Research, Inc. has two branches in the UK and the state of New Jersey in America. It works like many other American online survey sites where members receive points for surveys answered. When they have enough points, they can then redeem them for gift certificates, PayPal deposits or merchandise. Although Lightspeed promises many rewards for panel survey members, they come few and far between, unless you just happen to fit certain age and profession profiles.
Download Time
Unfortunately, Lightspeed is a graphic-intensive website with a short animated movie on the home page. It downloads much longer than at other online survey websites like E-Poll, Zoom Points or Global Test Market. When you receive an email invitation for a survey, you are not given a link directly to the survey. You have to log in on the homepage before you are allowed access to surveys, polls or to check how many points you have.
Logging onto the surveys also takes much longer than for other online consumer research websites. Once you get onto your Member page and click onto a survey link, you are often taken to a page with a picture and the words “survey loading.” Sometimes, another screen appears informing you that you will taken to a site off of Lightspeed. This takes up more time. Finally, one comes to the survey itself.
Qualifying
It is very difficult to qualify for a survey and get points. It is next to impossible if you happen to work in certain areas like journalism, advertising, PR work or the pharmaceutical industry. Instead of screening out people in these industries right away, you usually have to go through a few screens such as checking if your speakers work to listen to a train sound or log in your age, sex and where you live.
It would be nice if future Lightspeed surveys would just cut to the chase and list occupations FIRST, before all of the other rigmarole. If you do get to qualify, sit back and get comfortable, because the average Lightspeed survey is 20 minutes long. Many of these surveys are also graphics intensive and take a while to download.
What Do You Get?
This writer was a member of Lightspeed for four years. In that time, I earned a grand total of $40 (US.) Occasionally, during the first two years, I would receive free samples, but that stopped after 2008. Also, I received a fun notice that points can expire if they are not cashed in within two years. But if you do not have enough points to cash in, too bad. Basically, Lightspeed was not worth my time.
