When you’re looking for new ways to make money online, surveys are among the first options you run into. On MarketAgent you don’t even get anything else: the whole site is built around them.
The idea behind them is simple. You answer their questions, help them develop their products that way, and get some money in return, which you cash out to PayPal (it works in many countries, but the list has gaps, so check that yours is on it).
Is it a legitimate site that’s worth making an account for, or does it just eat up your time?
The answer comes from my full test, the same one I’ve run on the hundreds of paid survey sites I’ve tried so far, and here I’ll tell you what I found, what I liked, and what bothered me. There are downsides. A review that doesn’t mention any of them is, to me, just an ad, nothing more.
I’m telling you what I saw, but you’re the one who decides whether this site is for you.
What is Marketagent and how does it work?
The address of their head office in Switzerland and a phone number are listed right on their website, in plain view.
In WHOIS, things look different, because the owner’s details are hidden (privacy protection is turned on) and the only thing you can still see is the AT code, which belongs to Austria, not Switzerland, where the head office actually is. I wasn’t worried. The address and phone number on the site already told me where to look for the company. I think that with a survey site, this is almost always a good sign, since a company that really exists has no reason to hide where it’s based.
The domain marketagent.com has been active since January 23, 1999, and is registered through RegistryGate GmbH. This is not a site that popped up overnight.
The company officially reports these figures about itself: over 3 million panel members from all over the world, around 1,800 new sign-ups per day, more than 2 million euros paid out in bonuses, roughly 1,000 online surveys and over 1 million interviews per year.
All of these numbers come from them.
Of these, I spent the most time on the bonus figure. It’s the only amount that shows money that reached people, not how many signed up. As for size, with 3 million people in its panel, it isn’t small, and it built up trust over time, not all at once.
I’ll give the answer up front. MarketAgent Surveys is a legitimate site where you can make some extra money. Even though it’s legitimate, that doesn’t yet tell you whether it’s worth spending your time there. Below, I go through everything you’ll find on MarketAgent.com one by one, and you decide for yourself whether it’s for you.
Paid surveys online
As soon as I opened my MarketAgent account, I started on my profile and didn’t leave a single category blank. If you sign up after reading this review, do the same and don’t put it off, because your profile decides how many surveys reach you, and surveys are the main source of earnings here.
Other sites pay more per survey. On MarketAgent, though, the pay is fair for the time you put in, and with patience you can build up a good amount. There are quite a lot of surveys, but the number depends on your country and your profile. You can’t change your country. Your profile, on the other hand, you can build however you like.
The profile is what sorts the invitations. Say a video game company is looking for teenagers for a survey (the example is mine, not a real case). Their software combs the database for people who ticked “video games,” and anyone with an empty profile matches nothing in that search, so they get very few invitations or almost none.
In the main menu you’ll find two sections. Under “My Profile” you enter the basic details: your country, province, the size of your city, your city, postal code, street and house number. “Profile Extension” goes much deeper, with your occupation, household, electronics, health, travel, smoking and tobacco, media, computers and video games, food and drink, and cars. I think every category you skip is a survey that passes you by.
A completed profile isn’t everything. Four other things help you catch more surveys:
- Update your profile extensions whenever something about you changes. Each time you fill one in or update it, you get about 20 bonus points, roughly 0.20 euros (small change, but at least it’s paid).
- Choose to receive surveys by email, and MarketAgent sends you an invitation for every new survey that matches you, though in my case the email didn’t always arrive.
- Every so often, open “Overview” or “Current Surveys,” where you’ll find the list of all surveys.
- Turn on push notifications in the mobile app. The app asks you for them anyway, and rightly so. A survey has a strict cap on participants and often closes after the first 500 or 1,000 people, so if you don’t open the invitation within the first few minutes after the alert, the system locks you out.
A missed alert means a lost survey, no matter how detailed your profile is. All the work you did at the start then goes to waste if your phone isn’t within reach when it goes off.
It bothers me that everything comes down to a few minutes.
Each survey tells you upfront how many points you’ll get and how long it takes, with a note that the time is an estimate. On any survey site, those are the two things we all want to know before we press start.
You find your way around the site quickly. When I signed up, it looked different. Since then it’s had a big update, and now it looks newer and is simpler to use. I liked the change. If a site keeps getting updated, it means someone is still looking after it.
For other sites that pay for surveys, I’ve also written reviews of Hagen Sinclair, Ipsos Isay, InboxDollars, and TGM Panel, and you may find others you like as well.
Marketagent Mini-Surveys
On MarketAgent, in the members’ area, I’ve come across quite a few mini surveys, with questions like “Which streaming service do you prefer, Netflix or Disney+?” or “What’s your favorite type of coffee, cappuccino or latte?”
The only thing they have in common with regular surveys is the name. Here, no company asks you anything. You write the question and post it in the app’s feed, the public one. Then the other members, people like you and me, tap a button and vote, and when they post something, you vote on theirs. They’re actually social surveys, from the community, and that changes both the time and the pay, because the rules of paid surveys don’t apply anymore.
As for time, a question with 2-4 possible answers takes you under a minute (the form also leaves room for a fifth option, if you need it). As for money, you get 0.00 euros. Nobody pays you for the question you write or for the votes you cast, whether in euros or in bonus points.
A minute for nothing.
If you still want to post one, I got to the form from the main menu, through “Activity” and “My mini surveys,” where the “Add Surveys” button is. There are five fields, and you fill them out in the order below:
- “Your Question,” for your question.
- Two optional boxes, which you check only when they’re useful to you. With “Allow multiple answers,” whoever votes can pick more than one option. With “Quiz,” each person sees whether they picked the right answer, and that’s the one I’d check (with a correct answer in play, it’s more fun).
- “Answer 1” and “Answer 2,” which you can’t skip.
- “Answer 3,” “Answer 4,” and “Answer 5,” only if you want more options.
- “Add,” the button at the end.
Even though they’re fun in their own way, especially with the quiz turned on, they don’t hold my attention when I know this time doesn’t earn me any money. I’ve stuck with paid surveys. I don’t think a question about pizza is worth even that one minute.
Refer a friend
MarketAgent gave me my referral link ready to use, with no technical steps on my part. If you want one too, here’s how to get to it:
- Log in to the official portal or open the app on your phone.
- From the menu, go to “Activity”, then to “Invite Friends”.
- Your unique link, personalized for your account, is waiting there for you to copy.
- Send it through WhatsApp, Discord, social media or a simple message to the people you know would answer surveys (you can leave the ones who run from forms alone).
Once you’ve sent the link, your part is done, but sending it isn’t what earns you money. The reward only shows up once the person completes at least one official survey on the site. A friend who signs up through your link, doesn’t fill out their profile and doesn’t answer a single survey earns you exactly 0 euros, even though you’re the one who brought them there.
Their first completed survey earns you between 50 and 150 points. The exact amount is decided by the country they live in, and insisting won’t change it. Their country decides, not you.
Even then, the points don’t show up right away. Before anything else, their system checks that the survey was really completed, and only after that does it add the 150 points to your balance, sometimes after a few hours, other times after a few days. A balance that doesn’t change immediately is normal here.
If you know a lot of people who’d be interested in surveys, a bit of extra money will still add up. But I’ve put this program side by side with plenty of other referral programs, and here you can earn clearly less, which is why I wouldn’t count on it. I see it as a small bonus that comes when it comes.
How do you get paid?
I didn’t request my money from MarketAgent until I reached 1,500 points, even though withdrawals to PayPal or Skrill become available at 1,000, which is around 10 euros (or 10 dollars).
The reason is the fee. On any withdrawal under 15 euros, the site keeps 100 of your points, and over 1,500 it doesn’t hold anything back.
The surveys there pay in points, which you then exchange for rewards, and I used their figures to see how much you actually lose. A dollar is about 100 points and a point is one euro cent, so the 100 points they keep are a whole euro. If you cash out at 1,000, you get 9 euros instead of 10, and a tenth of the whole amount is gone. At 1,500 you get all 15.
It would have annoyed me to give that euro away for nothing when I only had 500 more points to collect to reach the threshold. The wait is worth it. The threshold is easy to reach.
The points don’t stay in your account forever, though. You have them for 2 years from when you earned them, and if you don’t use your account or withdraw them in those 24 months, the system removes them on its own, no matter how hard you worked for them or how many there are. Don’t put off withdrawing for too long!
What you get for your points depends on the method you choose. In my account, 4 showed up:
- PayPal, where the money arrives 48-72 hours after you request it
- Skrill, a digital wallet you use to send money online
- payment through WISE
- donation, the only one where you don’t see any money
When you donate, the points officially go to environmental or social causes, such as planting trees or funding research. However, not everyone has the same options, because the methods and thresholds change from country to country, and you might find a different list in your account.
I think these withdrawal methods are good. When I signed up, the points system was really hard to understand (you had no idea how much money your points were worth). Now the math is easy to do, and I’m glad about that.
If PayPal is your preferred method, in my experience, Timebucks or Earnopolis have better reward options (they’re also survey sites that pay via PayPal).
How much money can you make?
On MarketAgent, a survey only pays you when you make it all the way to the end, to the last question.
A few times, I answered questions for a minute or two, then a pop-up appeared on the screen thanking me for taking part, and, before I got the chance to finish, I was sent to a standard page. They thanked me nicely. That was it.
This is what disqualification looks like. The system decides you’re not the kind of buyer the company wanted, and from then on, there’s no payment coming for that survey. The minutes you put in up to that point are lost, and I’m not talking about an isolated case, because a good share of my surveys ended like this, before reaching the end. Those lost minutes add up, and for me they weigh more heavily than the survey payment.
When a survey goes all the way through, a regular one made for a company takes 5-10 minutes and officially pays from 0.50 to 2 euros. Specialized ones can reach 5 euros or more, but I’ve come across them very rarely.
You don’t have much to choose from, either. The official invitations come to about 2-5 a week, depending on your profile (where you live, what technology you use) and your country, because the number of surveys isn’t the same everywhere. However much you’d like to, you can’t do 50 surveys in a row.
Say you have a week with 5 invitations, you get through all of them to the end, and each one pays 2 euros. You’d end up with 10 euros, and that’s without a single disqualification along the way. How much do you earn in the end? There’s no way to know ahead of time, with so few invitations and so many surveys cut off halfway through.
Still, things have gotten better. In recent years more surveys have come in, and they pay better, well enough to be okay. If you log in often, you’ll make up to 20 euros a month in your free time, sometimes a little more. That’s not much.
Judging by what I’ve earned, MarketAgent hasn’t brought me much money, and I don’t think you can count on it when you want to make money. Among the other survey sites, it has its place, but I wouldn’t make it my main source of income.
How do you ask for help?
When a survey breaks halfway through, when something’s wrong with your account, or when points are missing from your balance, the best option at Marketagent is email at [email protected]. You can use it for any kind of problem, from your account and technical errors to points that never came through.
I looked through the app for a 24/7 live chat and didn’t find one. They keep all their support to a few set channels.
The official phone number is there too, on the site’s homepage. But the company is based in Baden, Austria, and if you call from anywhere else, you pay international call rates. If you don’t live in Austria, the call is almost never worth the cost. I’d write to them.
They only read messages Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central European Time (CET, so it’s a good idea to work out the time difference if you’re in another time zone). Anything you send on Saturday or Sunday sits unread until Monday.
A reply won’t come in 5 seconds. By email, getting something resolved usually takes up to a week. If your points have disappeared or a survey got stuck, add a few business days on top of that while the database team checks the error and corrects the balance in your profile. That’s a long wait for points you’ve already earned.
At least someone actually reads the complaints. The support team replies to 98% of the negative reviews users leave.
For members, their support is good, even if it’s slow and only runs during office hours.
Marketagent Trustpilot Reviews: What Do Users Say?
Several people write in their reviews that they requested a PayPal withdrawal and had the money in their account within 24 hours. Marketagent’s good rating rests on these payouts, and apart from them, people praise the simple interface and the things they find there every day, like the rewards wheel, which I’m a fan of too and I’m not mentioning just to fill space.
The other reviews talk about how few surveys there are (some people don’t get a single invitation for months at a time, especially in certain regions). When one does come in, you might run into a screenout, meaning you answer half the questions and then the survey kicks you out, with nothing for the questions you’ve already answered. That time is gone. Fewer people write that the points are slow to add up before you can cash out.
The ratings aren’t the same everywhere either. I came across four, and they’re pretty far apart:
- On Trustpilot, for the main domain, 4.5 out of 5, from 20,431 reviews. That’s the score I go by, because it comes from the most people, and I think it shows better than the others that the company is legitimate.
- In the iOS app, 3.5, from only 24 user ratings.
- On SurveyPolice, 3, as the average of 13 reviews, which is far too few to draw a conclusion from.
- On a second Trustpilot profile, set up for the panel.marketagent.com subdomain, 2.9 from 30 reviews. I don’t know why it’s so far off from the main domain.
Even the roughly 20,400 reviews on Trustpilot, the most in one place, don’t carry much weight next to the 3 million members Marketagent says it has in its panel. I divided one by the other, and it comes out to under 1%. We have no way of knowing what everyone else thinks.
Marketagent replies to 98% of negative reviews, within a week or so. I checked the percentage myself, because their word wasn’t enough for me (and it’s accurate).
I didn’t find any scandals, even though I specifically looked for them, and no point where opinions suddenly flipped either. They only go up and down with the season, depending on how many surveys are on the site at the time, and otherwise they stay put.
Red Flags you should never ignore
I looked for signs of fraud and didn’t find any. No payments left unpaid, no stories about a site that disappeared overnight with people’s money. The people who collect reviews of sites like this list it among the trustworthy ones, and I think they’re right.
I also liked one small thing, the cookie banner, which is done properly (the button to decline is right in front of you, you don’t have to hunt for it in some corner).
What I liked less is how much they want to know about you. To match you with surveys, they ask for a ton of demographic information, in a lot of detail, and at the start, when you fill it in, you give it to them with every detail, exactly as it is. They say in their privacy policy that everything is anonymized by the time it reaches clients. I couldn’t verify that.
I’m not too worried, because I didn’t find any deletion request left unanswered or any data breach. You still fill in the profile, but it’s good to know what you’re leaving there about yourself.
The real risk is a different one, and it has to do with time, not money.
You start a survey, answer every question accurately, and at some point the system kicks you out because you’re not the person it’s looking for (“screen out,” as they call it), and you get nothing for everything you’ve checked off up to that point. Even though that’s how it works everywhere in the industry, and it’s not just them, nobody gives you back the time you spent on that survey. And it can add up to a lot.
Your money is safe. Your time isn’t.
Who can use Marketagent?
When I signed up, the list of countries on Marketagent was a lot shorter. Now it has over 89, so the site collects opinions from all over, not from just one country, and I think it’s changed for the better. You’ll find the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and South Africa there, but also a lot of other countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, and there’s no point in writing them all out here.
You can look yours up on the site. If it’s missing, it may show up later, because the list keeps growing.
What does matter, though, is how you choose your country when you sign up. It has to be the country you actually live in, the same one you go online from (meaning the one your IP address shows).
The rule comes from the way the surveys work. Their algorithm ties your profile to market research in your country, so if you live in Germany, you’ll answer questions about German brands and see your points balance kept in euros. In most of the countries where it runs, both the site and the surveys are in the local language (you don’t have to translate anything in your head anymore).
This is also where the temptation to use a VPN comes from. In other countries, the company surveys seem to pay better, and it might cross your mind to go on their version of the site. I wouldn’t touch that.
Their security system catches the account and flags it, and from that point on, the 1,000-point payout threshold stays out of reach, even though we’re talking about 10 euros, not a fortune. You can collect as many points as you want, you can take survey after survey.
The payout never comes.
Can you use it on your phone?
On mobile it works really well. Marketagent has its own app, and I installed it without looking up any guide, went through the menus without a tutorial and without needing any patience, and everything went smoothly on the first try.
Then I kept it on my phone for the surveys I do on the go. When I’m standing in line, when I have a break, or when I have a bit of free time left, I open it and fill one out.
On Google Play you’ll find it as “Marketagent – make money”. It has been downloaded over a million times and is rated 4.5 out of 5 from more than 14,000 reviews, so I’m not the only one who keeps it handy. For iPhone and iPad it’s in the App Store, in the Lifestyle category, and it takes up 109 MB (if you have free space on your phone, you have nothing to worry about).
The difference between the phone and the computer isn’t about the installation. On the computer you only get the surveys you already know. The app also has a few other ways to earn points, which are added right away to the wallet balance, next to the rest. For these points, I think it’s worth installing it, especially if you already do surveys on the site anyway.
So if you have a Marketagent account, put it on your phone too. I installed it and I don’t plan on deleting it.
Is Marketagent LEGIT or SCAM?
When I cashed out on Marketagent, they sent my money with no delay at all, the same way everyone else there gets paid. That didn’t surprise me. Behind the site is a long-established Austrian market research company, and almost nobody has anything bad to say about it. You can easily find out who runs it and how it’s organized, and when you contact support, a real person actually answers (I wrote to them and got a reply quickly).
The surveys are what test your patience. They don’t come often, and sometimes you get nothing for long stretches. Then, when one finally shows up, you can get through a good part of the questions and be disqualified halfway, after all the time you’ve already put in (not on every survey, but often enough to annoy you). I don’t blame Marketagent for this. That’s how any survey panel works, and it’s happened to all of us who take surveys.
Meanwhile, the site has gotten better in recent years. Now you actually build up some money, little by little, just from sharing your opinions.
I see it as a good fit for someone who’s patient, wants a small side income, and accepts that disqualifications are part of any survey. Anyone looking for quick money or large sums will get bored here quickly.
I think there are better survey sites than this one, though that doesn’t rule it out. It gets more useful with each additional site you sign up for. If you only have time for a few, I wouldn’t make it one of them.
Have you used Marketagent too, or is something about it on your mind? Tell me in the comments. I’d love to hear about it!