Introduction
Welcome to my complete and comprehensive Swagbucks review.
Swagbucks is a really popular website to earn money and other rewards for doing simple things like taking surveys, watching videos, answering polls, and more. You’re probably here because you want to know what to expect when you join Swagbucks.
Well, I’ve been a member of Swagbucks for a few years, and so, in this article, I’m going to share with you my experience on Swagbucks. I’ll go over what you should know before you sign up for Swagbucks.
Now Swagbucks is one of the best survey sites I recommend. If you’d like other ideas for places to sign up for online surveys, you can check out my article on the best online survey sites.
But, before I begin my review, I need to let you in on a disclaimer!
Disclaimer: Surveys Can’t Make You Rich
You CANNOT get rich from taking surveys. Simple as that.
Companies are willing to legitimately pay you for your time and opinion, but they have other expenses to worry about, so they just can’t help you replace your nine-to-five by paying you a lot for surveys.
So, if you have been trying to look for survey sites that pay you $100, $50, or even $20 per survey, you might as well give up.
However, taking online surveys can be a great side hustle for you. And if you’re only a kid or teenager looking to make some extra money for yourself or your family, rest assured it’s definitely possible.
Just don’t expect online surveys to be anything life-changing, that’s all.
Overview: The Pros and Cons
So let’s go over all the features, good and bad, that Swagbucks offers.
Pros of Using Swagbucks
- It gives you $5 for signing up
- It has many ways to earn
- It has extra hidden features
- It is mobile-friendly
- It has a referral program
Cons of Using Swagbucks
- Its currency is SB, not dollars
- It does not pay fair for certain tasks
- It is not really worldwide
For the rest of this article, I’ll be explaining these features to you in further detail.
Pros of Using Swagbucks
Swagbucks Gives You $5 For Signing Up
Now, who doesn’t love free money? If you sign up for Swagbucks, you instantly earn points worth $5 to get you started! This is probably the greatest benefit you’ll love about Swagbucks, so I had to mention this first.
But, of course, there are other great things about Swagbucks, so let’s move on.
Swagbucks Has Many Ways to Earn
Swagbucks is a place where you can earn money doing all sorts of very simple and straightforward things. On the home page of the Swagbucks website, all the different ways to earn are summarized on the left side of the screen: Answer, Shop, Discover, Watch, Search, and Play.
Let’s go through what these different ways are:
- Answer: Take surveys and make money.
- Shop: You can earn cashback for shopping online at participating websites. In this section, you can find offers for these sites. When you choose an offer, Swagbucks takes you to the site to start shopping. Then they automatically copy the promo code for you so you can paste it inside the website and redeem your cashback after you pay. Even though you don’t exactly earn money this way, you do save some extra money.
- Discover: This is where you can find offers that meet their needs and get paid to complete those offers. Many of these offers are things that you would buy on a daily basis anyway. For example, there is an offer where you can buy Aleve at a Walmart and get rewarded for doing it. Just go to your local Walmart, buy the Aleve, upload your receipt, and earn! That’s all there is to it in the Discover section.
- Watch: You can earn a little bit of money by watching videos and rating them with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
- Search: If you “feel lucky”, as Google Search says it, you can search on Swagbucks’ search engine. Then, see if you’re lucky to suddenly earn a bit of money searching for a keyword. Keep in mind you’re not always going to earn for every search, but only once in a while.
- Play: Games are fun, but Swagbucks might make them more fun. Every time you win a game inside Swagbucks, you earn a little bit of money. And, as long as you keep playing every single day, you can start making a few extra dollars a day.
So you can clearly see, based on how long this list was, that you have several choices when it comes to getting rewarded on Swagbucks, which is basically why it’s the most popular online rewards website.
Swagbucks Has Extra Hidden Features
If you thought these were a ton of ways to reward yourself on a single website, think again! Swagbucks also offers multiple bonus features that will allow you to earn even more on the site than what a Swagbucks member would typically earn. Here are all the extra hidden features you can find on Swagbucks:
- Swag Codes, which you can only find if you follow Swagbucks on Facebook or if you use the SwagButton (see below). By redeeming a Swag Code, you earn a few extra points. (I go over what the Swagbucks currency is and how much you earn later on in the article)
- The SwagButton browser plugin, where you can: 1) be notified of promo codes that you can redeem on a shopping site where you can earn cashback, 2) be notified of survey opportunities, and 3) find out if there are Swag Codes you can redeem.
- The Swag Up bonuses which, if you activate them, will allow you to earn additional points or twice as many points than usual for doing some of the tasks you do inside Swagbucks.
- Swago, which is a limited-time exclusive way to earn additional points. Just do specific tasks on Swagbucks and, similar to a bingo game, you mark off areas of your board. By forming a pattern on your board, you earn the number of points associated with that pattern.
- The Team Challenge where you are randomly assigned to a team and you contribute points to your team by doing any of the tasks on Swagbucks. The more points your team has (compared to the other teams), the greater your reward will be at the end of the team challenge.
- A Daily Bonus List where, if you complete certain tasks before the end of the day, you earn bonus points.
If you participate in these features, you can be sure to add even more points to your account and, before you know it, you’ll be able to redeem your reward sooner than you think!
Swagbucks Is Mobile-Friendly
So what do I mean by that? Well, I know many of you use your mobile devices and, chances are, you’re reading this article from your smartphone or tablet. And the good news is that you can start using Swagbucks through their mobile apps.
The main Swagbucks mobile app will let you manage your Swagbucks profile and do much of the Swagbucks tasks I mentioned earlier, all available to you in the palm of your hand. Download it from Google Play or from the iOS App Store.
Swagbucks also has other mobile apps besides its main Swagbucks app.
Swagbucks LIVE is a really engaging app where you correctly answer a set of 10 quiz questions in order to win thousands of dollars. You have this grand opportunity to do so every single day and it’s all by taking part in Swagbucks LIVE. You can download it from Google Play or from the iOS App Store.
Swagbucks Watch is where you can do your video tasks on Swagbucks easily, all inside one app. Download it from Google Play.
Swagbucks Answer is where you can focus on answering Swagbucks surveys and earning points completing them. Download it from Google Play or from the iOS App Store.
MovieCli.ps is where you can watch movie trailers and earn extra points doing that. Download it from Google Play or from the iOS App Store.
Swagbucks Has a Referral Program
As with most other survey sites out there, Swagbucks does have a referral program and a good one at that! All you need to do is share your referral link with others. If someone signs up through your link AND earns points worth $3 within 30 days, you earn $3 as well. You can also recommend the SwagButton and, if someone installs it, you earn an easy $1.
That way, you can earn money passively without doing much of anything. This is definitely a great way to make money online and it’s called affiliate marketing. All you need to do is put in the work and you can eventually start earning passively.
If that sounds good to you, check out my affiliate marketing beginner’s guide as well as how you can get started step by step.
Cons of Using Swagbucks
Currency is SB, Not Dollars
So, now, we’re going to talk about the currency that you earn inside Swagbucks because, unfortunately, it’s not dollars. It’s SB (Swag Bucks) points. I find this a downside to Swagbucks (and other survey sites as well) because the big number and confusing conversion make it tricky to figure out how much you earned.
Fortunately, though, the currency conversion inside Swagbucks is not too hard. 100 SB points are equal to $1. We can think of converting our points in Swagbucks similar to how we convert in the metric system (100 cm = 1 m). We simply remove the two zeros and we know how many dollars we earned.
But, honestly, the fact that you need to convert how much you earn is still not exactly fun, right?
Swagbucks Does Not Pay Fair for Certain Tasks
I think this is the most outrageous thing about Swagbucks. Even though I mentioned earlier that Swagbucks has so many tasks for you to earn on the site, the compensation Swagbucks gives you for taking some of your precious time to work on these tasks is pathetic! Here are some examples.
- For completing a poll, you earn 1 SB (a penny) and you can only take a poll only once a day. Make it 10 SB (a dime) and I think that’s reasonable.
- For watching a set of videos, even ones that are 30-60 minutes, all you earn is 2 SB (2 cents). I’d watch videos on Swagbucks if only they could pay me 50 SB for every 30 minutes of video (50 cents).
- For doing the Search option, yes, I randomly earn points, but only 2 SB. Since chances are random, shouldn’t a better deal be 40 SB? That would incentivize us to use Swagbucks Search instead of Google!
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m so willing to complete their good-paying surveys (some pay over 100 SB), but I don’t think I would waste time with any of their other tasks. They’re just a really big timekiller in my humble opinion.
Swagbucks Is Not Really Worldwide
I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but maybe you’re reading this from a country that is sadly not supported by Swagbucks. According to the Swagbucks Help Center, they are open to “most countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia” as well as “some countries in Africa”.
What’s even more disappointing is that they don’t even tell you the exact countries they’re available or not available in. This stinks because, now, you have to manually go to Swagbucks and try signing up to figure out if you’re even able to sign up or not!
So there are essentially two problems here: first, Swagbucks is not available in several countries, and second, we don’t know what exactly those countries are. This is why I think that Swagbucks really needs to do more to connect with people around the world.
Conclusion
At this point, after all of these pros and cons that we went through, you might be wondering: so is Swagbucks worth checking out or not? Well, I’ll let you be the judge for that, but maybe you need a score to help you in your decision making.
So, with that, here’s our rating for Swagbucks, based on my three survey rating factors of Simple, Engaging, and Quick.
Swagbucks Review
Summary
Swagbucks doesn’t really pay you that much, but it is very engaging, so it can encourage you to do more and earn more in the process.
Now don’t feel discouraged by this rating. I could’ve given a worse grade than this. While Swagbucks is a bit overrated, I’ve heard of some people who have been able to support themselves financially thanks to Swagbucks!
Let me wrap up this article by going over how we chose the ratings that we did for Swagbucks.
Simple? I’m not sure if I can actually say that Swagbucks is simple. Yes, it’s user-friendly and clean, but it’s also easy to feel lost or overwhelmed with the many tasks you can do on the website.
Engaging? What’s really engaging about Swagbucks is the surveys and referrals and all the bonus ways you can earn on the website. But, as I mentioned earlier, the payment Swagbucks gives you for other tasks like videos and search leaves a lot to be desired!
Quick? Swagbucks is definitely not quick when it comes to surveys, and some of their other tasks are really time-consuming and are not even worth your time.
So there you go. This concludes my complete review of Swagbucks. There’s certainly nothing wrong giving it a try: you might find it fun. However, just understand it will take some time before you can reap your reward on Swagbucks.
If you’re ready to try it out for yourself, you can use the link below or head over to swagbucks.com.