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What is Prolific?

Previously known as Prolific Academic, is the world’s largest crowdsourcing community of people for science research. Universities and colleges from all around the world post studies and recruit the right participants. Participants earn money while helping to advance human knowledge. Surveys on Prolific helps professors to do their researches and for students to complete their thesis works. Prolific is legit and definitely not a scam. Today I am going to review Prolific and see what it makes them to stand out from usual survey sites like Swagbucks or Qmee.

Surveys with Prolific academic are much more interesting and most of the times researchers will inform you about the purpose of the research, and often will give a followup link. If you are interested, you can see the research results once a study is closed. This way, you can feel that your work on Prolific is being valued and important. Once you reserved your place for the survey, you will never be “screened out”. It is again a great benefit in comparison to regular studies on other popular survey websites.

How much money can you make with Prolific?

You can earn money with Prolific by participating in researches available on their survey platform. The user interface is easy to navigate and use. You can find surveys by clicking the “STUDIES” tab in the top left corner of the site.

Prolific company values your time, and they are committed to paying a fair amount to every participant. Their minimum pay as it stands now is $6.50 (something about £5.00 in UK) per hour. Often researchers pay higher or much higher rates. For example, today, I have had a couple of surveys available, and pay was £8.40 and £9.60 per hour. In any case, even £5.00 makes this survey platform to stand out when comparing the hourly rate with other popular survey websites.

Bear in mind, surveys indicating the average expected time for a study to complete. But I found that in most of the cases, you need slightly less time than survey advised. So this survey for £0.20, had three multiple choice questions, it took me less than a minute to complete, on this occasion, my actual hourly rate was above £12.00 per hour.

Payment usually allowed either instantly or a few days later. If researched did not approve your answers for a longer time, then Prolific will auto-approve them after 22 days.

The only downside is, there are not too many surveys available, and once they on, they go quickly. Although the payment rate compensates for this matter, quality over the quantity, this is my mojo 🙂 Better fewer surveys with a higher pay rate than many studies with low pay.

The referral scheme on Prolific has been closed since March 2019 and unfortunately no longer provides any benefit to users.

Referrals As of 14 March 2019 the participant referral scheme has been retired.  At Prolific, building a high quality pool of participants to take part in world-leading research is one of our biggest priorities. We are keen to grow this pool in a balanced way as possible, to discourage population biases and maximise diversity. This is a decision we have carefully considered as a team. Analyses performed by our research team indicate that participant referrals can cause problems by reinforcing certain demographics in our participant pool – a tendency we would like to curb in order to improve the diversity of our pool. This change has some upsides for both researchers and participants: It will allow us to distribute studies across our pool more evenly. This should mean that fewer participants will find it hard to get any studies. Please note that the researcher referral scheme is still active. © Prolific 2019. Powered by Help Scout

How to register and start working on Prolific?

The process is straightforward. Go to Prolific and click on “SIGN UP TO PARTICIPATE.”

Choose the option “I want to take part in studies” and then pick a country of your residence. Which countries Prolific is available? Prolific is an international survey provider and looking for people from many countries. A list of countries which can participate can be found here “Supported Countries“. Fill out the rest of the form with your DOB, name, email address and create a password for your account. Tick the boxes that you agree with Prolific T&C’s and click register. You will then get an email asking to confirm your registration.

Once confirmed, you then go to the main page of the user interface, and you will see the first survey available to take. This survey is created by Prolific to give you a brief guide about Prolific.

After you have completed this survey, click on the tab “ABOUT YOU,” and there you need to fill in a 100+ question profile questionnaire. Once it’s done, you are good to start with surveys.

As mentioned previously, there are not too many surveys available at all times, therefore don’t be shocked if nothing is available yet. You need to monitor the Prolific main page and wait for surveys, or you can install a browser extension “Prolific Assistant” and set to scan the Prolific page every minute. Once a study is available, you will get sound and desktop notification, “New research available on Prolific.” This means you can carry on with your daily works and pop back into the Prolific page only when you get an alert.

Sometimes you get an email notification about available surveys looking for participants, but I rather have their page open and let “Prolific Assistant” scan for new studies all day long. If you are using “Windows 10” after you hear the sound about new survey, you can click “Notifications” tab on your desktop (bottom right corner of your screen), and you will see new notifications there, choose and click on Prolific notification, and you will be taken directly to the survey.

I have been using Prolific for few months now and found to be very satisfied with their service. I think Prolific is one of the best available survey providers on the net. I’ve made, on average, 40£ per month and was able to cash out without any issues.

PROS

• Great pay rates. It is well above average than paid on other popular survey sites.
• Prolific will never “screen” you out. Once you completed your personal information questionnaire, any surveys you get and reserve, will let you to complete them and will pay.
• Researches on Prolific are much more fun to do than regular studies on other survey sites.

CONS

• Not too many surveys available, and once they on, they go quickly.

Prolific won’t make you rich, but it is a great place to make extra money online. And it could be an excellent addition to the more significant savings.

If you found this information useful, please share and leave a comment.

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Don’t forget key facts about making money online

• Regularly withdraw your earnings from the website. Do not use survey sites as your saving accounts. Anything can happen, and if the company goes busted, your earnings are gone as well.
• I suggest to have a secondary email address for your side hustles online. Otherwise, your primary email account might be flooded with spam and unnecessary emails.
• Don’t forget to declare your extra income to HMRC at the end of the financial year. You must report this as a self-employed income.

Are you looking for similar survey websites like Prolific?

I have tested plenty of survey websites and have picked a handful of them, which performed at it’s best. Please see the following review:

TOP 4 – Best survey sites in the UK