Hiving Surveys Review
Hiving Surveys, a well-established player in the online survey industry, has been offering paid opportunities to its members since 2009. In this review, we will take a closer look at Hiving Surveys and assess whether it’s worth your time and effort to sign up.
Is Hiving a legit survey site?
This is a legit company. Founded in Paris in 2009, Hiving is a veteran provider of online samples to the market research industry. By facilitating access to research participants, they have helped countless companies and brands gain a better understanding of their target audience.
What’s the concept?
Hiving Surveys is a survey site that allows users to earn points by completing surveys. The concept is simple: users provide their opinions on a variety of topics and receive rewards in return. What many users may not realize is that they are actually helping Hiving, the site’s owner, gather valuable market research data that is sold to clients in the business world.
The way it works is that Hiving identifies target groups for consumer surveys based on the specific needs of their clients. For example, a client in the beauty industry may request a survey focused on consumers who purchase high-end skincare products. Or, a client in the automotive industry may be interested in gathering opinions from car owners who recently purchased a new vehicle.
Hiving dashboard showing surveys available
Once the target group is identified, Hiving creates a survey that asks questions related to the subject matter. Users who match the target group criteria are then invited to complete the survey and earn points in exchange for their time and effort.
The concept of signing up is a win-win situation. Users are able to earn rewards while providing valuable market research data to clients in a variety of industries.
Hiving payment page
Payment options
While signing up for Hiving Surveys may seem like a promising opportunity to earn rewards, the reality is a bit more complicated. The site offers several ways to redeem rewards, including PayPal, prize draws, and donations to charity. However, the average points per survey is a mere 350, and users can redeem when they have reached $4.
1000 points are worth $1. Here is an overview of the surveys we were invited to:
Points | Length (estimated) | Points per minute | Value |
135 | 8 | 17 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.14 |
254 | 16 | 16 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.25 |
254 | 16 | 16 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.25 |
254 | 16 | 16 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.25 |
254 | 16 | 16 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.25 |
203 | 12 | 17 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.20 |
330 | 22 | 15 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.33 |
256 | 9 | 28 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.26 |
78 | 6 | 13 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.08 |
134 | 4 | 34 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.13 |
121 | 12 | 10 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.12 |
94 | 8 | 12 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.09 |
124 | 10 | 12 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.12 |
101 | 8 | 13 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.10 |
698 | 13 | 54 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.70 |
577 | 11 | 52 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.58 |
550 | 9 | 61 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.55 |
587 | 15 | 39 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.59 |
587 | 12 | 49 | Â $Â Â Â Â Â Â 0.59 |
Based on our experience, for a 10-minute survey, we only got paid $0.25 on average. Actually, if excluding the few higher-paid surveys, the average is more like $0.15 for a standard consumer survey. This means you need to complete at least 16 surveys to reach the payment threshold.
So even if the payment limit of $4 is pretty low in comparison with many other survey sites, you still need to take a huge amount of surveys before being able to cash out.
It’s important to note that Hiving Surveys does offer some unique reward options, such as prize draws and donations to charity. However, the actual value of these rewards is difficult to quantify, and members may find it more worthwhile to focus on earning cash rewards via PayPal.
While Hiving Surveys may offer a range of reward options, the low average points per survey and high redemption threshold may make it challenging for members to earn a significant amount of money. If you’re looking to earn extra income through online surveys, it may be worth exploring other options with more generous rewards.
Pros and cons
Here is a summary of Hiving:
Positives:
On the positive side, users can earn cash payments through PayPal, which is a popular and widely used payment method. Additionally, the payout threshold of $4 is relatively low, which means users can cash out their rewards more quickly than with some other survey sites – at least in theory.
Negatives:
The biggest downside of signing up with Hiving is that most of the surveys come from the survey platform Cint or similar survey networks, or marketplaces as they are also called. These 3rd party survey platforms pay very little, and you’ll often run into technical issues. It’s not uncommon to hit a dead end when taking surveys through Cint, not even being redirected to the survey dashboard. The combination of low rewards ($0.25 per survey) and the technical glitches on their platform can make it a frustrating experience to take surveys through Hiving.
Dead end: Cint error page
The user experience is not the best, with a dated design. Many of the profiling questions are also very difficult for ordinary survey takers to understand. Here is an example of Hiving asking respondents which socio-economic level they belong to:
Screenshot of Hiving asking respondents for their Socio-Economic Level
It should be obvious that most people have no idea which socio-economic level they fall into. Not only is it very confusing for respondents to answer these horribly designed survey questions. Hiving will also risk providing invalid data to their clients since many respondents will just resort to answering random questions.