💧 Fun With Surveys

[Where’s the data? I smell data! Data! Data! Gotta be data, only one things smells like data and that’s data! Data data data!]
Long ago, it could be both fun and profitable to take an internet survey. In the late ’90s, it was novel to have someone care about your opinion, and companies existed that connected you to surveys that paid real money.

In the modern era, however, practically every company on earth wants to mine you for your data. They ask for feedback constantly, about every conceivable thing. It’s a scourge. I’ve been asked to rate a purchase of dental floss, as well as the experience of using a restroom. Nearly every day I receive at least one email asking me to share my feedback about something, and lately, I’ve begun to receive follow-up “reminder” messages. Marketers really need to knock that shit off.

All of these emails prattle on about just how much my opinion is valued, yet hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Last week, I received the following:

We value your time as much as your feedback, so upon survey completion, you will be entered into a sweepstakes to win one of three $100 REI gift cards. Winners will be selected by April 30, 2025 and will be notified by email.

Even if we trust that those gift cards really are awarded, this is pathetic. The slim chance of getting a $100 gift card is not at all worth spending a quarter of an hour on an online survey, and prefacing that meager offer with a claim that they value my time is insulting. That email quickly found its way to the trash.

Recently, though, I did find myself clicking through to a survey. It started when I signed up with a service called Arbor, which attempts to automatically reduce your energy bill by finding lower-cost electricity suppliers. Not long after I signed up, they emailed me the following:

I was very curious as to exactly what their one question could be, so I clicked the link. Here’s where I was led:

I found the 0 to 10 scale rather odd, and the asterisk did not appear to lead anywhere. Still, I clicked “7”, and then “OK”. That’s when their lie was revealed, as a question 2 immediately appeared:

No! One cannot state that they’re running a one-question survey, and then follow up with a second question. That’s false advertising, man! It’s dirty pool! It’s 100% more questions than claimed!

Though I contemplated bailing entirely, I instead gave myself a real chuckle with the following reply:

I doubt my snark will change anything, but it tickles me still.

I intended to end this piece there, but after writing it, I stumbled upon a rather hilarious postscript. In contrast to the no-doubt-slim odds of winning a prize in a post-survey raffle, Arbor offers a generous, and guaranteed, referral program, paying out $20 for each new account ($10 to the referrer and $10 to the new user). If you’re in America, you can get $10 just by signing up for their free service through this link.

That means that while their survey team may be a pack of liars, Arbor actually is worth talking about. Nevertheless, that “7” I gave them really was quite high, because I’m simply not in the habit of chatting with my friends and colleagues about a service that reduce electric bills. Depending how much sweet referral cash this post rakes in, however, I could get in the habit of writing about it.