Bottom line, companies need to get your feedback.

Companies spend billions of dollars a year on marketing campaigns, so they want to make sure they are getting their message across and that the money is well spent. They can't afford to put out an ad that stumbles , therefore, a lot of the surveys focus around future advertising campaigns.

Movie studios almost always run a longer version of a movie before it is released to test audiences and use the test audiences response to determine what portions need to be cut out and what ending to use. Movies costs millions of dollars to make so making a hit becomes more and more critical. I recently heard a story about Rambo. In the original showing, Rambo committed suicide. Test audiences screamed. They hated this ending. One participant said if the director is in the audience, he should be shot! Based on this feedback, the ending was changed. Hence the Rambo 2 and 3 and the upcoming Rambo 4 sequels.

Could you imagine spending 50 million dollars on a new product and then when it goes to market, no one wants the product? Why leave it to chance? Create some drawings or a prototype and ask a lot of people if they would be interested in the product. One example of this is a new type of aerosol can made for Lysol. Over 10 ago, to protect the environment, Lysol was thinking about coming out with a new aerosol can for their air fresheners that you pumped. They came up with prototypes and surveyed people if they would buy this and how much they would pay for it. It turns out people weren't willing to pay enough, so the product never came out. Who knows, maybe if they tried this again, people would be more interested now a days.

Television and radio stations determine their ad rates based on the number of people that watch and listen to their programming. We've all hard of the Neilson ratings and sweeps week. Yes, there are some automated ways to determine what people watch or listen to, but the majority of the time it is done by surveys. Neilson still selects random households to keep a diary of their television viewing habits or a month.

As bad as this sounds, lawyers need your opinion as well for lawsuits. One big lawsuit concerned the major credit card companies American Express and Visa. For the 1998 Winter Olympics, Visa would show ads saying you can go to Nagano, but don't take  your American Express card, because you can't get in. Well there was a lawsuit on what the ad was saying and the attorneys hired survey companies to get consumer opinion on what the ads meant. Did the ads mean you couldn't buy tickets for the Olympic games with American Express? Did they mean no one in Nagano would take American Express?

So where does the money come in?

Collecting surveys is big business. To prove this, in several malls, you will see survey companies that have people trying to select surveys from folks in the mall. Have you priced mall rental prices these days? These companies are paying over $100,00 just to rent that space in the mall! Survey companies get contracts from marketing firms, law firms etc to conduct a survey. These contracts can be worth upwards of millions of dollars, although most contracts are smaller. The survey company or firm hiring the company will write up a survey to collect the information needed and determine what demographics of people they want to get information from.

As people become more busy in there life and the do not call list gets bigger and bigger making people unavailable via the phone, survey companies must turn to incentives to get people to take time to take a survey. Usually the demographics and the amount of "work" involved in the survey determines how much a survey company will pay you to complete a survey. You still see a lot of survey companies that just give you sweepstake entries for some surveys

Movie advertisers and test audiences rarely pay for surveys. These are fun surveys and people are willing to see a movie commercial for a new movie or see a free movie without getting paid.

Surveys for pre-teens (age 12-14) often don't pay because getting this age group to spend fifteen minutes answering a few questions is simple. There exceptions to this rule though. Some video game surveys can take 20-30 minutes so they will often pay for a lengthy survey.

The hardest demographic to get surveys from are Women between the ages of 35 and 65. These are the prime grocery shoppers, they make a lot of decisions on what to buy in the household and usually are very busy, so the last thing they want to do is stop and answer questions about a new brand of toilet paper.

Another demographic that is difficult to get a response to is higher income people (you see a lot of investment surveys for this group) and business owners.

A lot of survey companies have figured out that a location at the mall isn't worth the money. Why not set-up an on-line survey, skip paying rent and skip paying all those people with clipboards and pay people on-line to complete a survey.

The more people an on-line survey company has signed up, the better they can advertise their "extensive" panel of consumers to get opinions from to potential clients. Having a lot of members is a great benefit to on-line survey companies so they want to retain members by making sure they get rewarded.

That in a nutshell is why survey companies pay you to take surveys.

Just because this is a legitimate business, that doesn't mean that there aren't scammers out there touting paid surveys, just pay me $50 and I'll give you a list or sham survey companies that require a membership fee. Be sure to check out my survey scam article for more information.