NOTE: Upvoice is no longer in service as of this publishing. This will be left up for archive purposes.
Upvoice is a Google Chrome extension that pays you daily tokens in which you can later redeem for a selection of e-gift cards.
The company notes that, as a qualified member, you can earn up to $75 per year spending time on the websites you’re already visiting such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the likes.
It seems to be as easy as installing it and forgetting about it, but is it worth the download?
Upvoice Review
In today’s review, I decided to download the extension and see what it’s all about. I will talk about the company, how the extension works as well as if it’s worth it.
As in all my reviews, I’m always 100% honest, no matter what kind of relationship I have with the advertiser. To maintain my integrity, I would never ever recommend a product that I personally wouldn’t use.
If you want to get paid to do nothing, then this extension may be ideal. Let’s find out if it is.
What is Upvoice?
As an Upvoice panelist, you instantly become a member of an exclusive company that helps multi-billion dollar corporations with their marketing strategies. According to the company, this means that you have a direct influence on the online advertising campaigns of the bigger brands.
When you regularly visit any of the participating websites while the extension is activated, it will collect the ads that you see as well as anonymous demographic profile data. This is then used for marketing purposes to help companies analyze advertising insights. They say they won’t share your personal information, except for when they need to send out your reward. You can view more about the company’s highest security standards inside of their privacy policy.
The company is operated under the BrandTotal umbrella, which is a real-time competitive analysis company founded in 2016. According to the company’s site, they are said to be a “real-time competitive intelligence platform designed to give media, insights and analytics teams full visibility into their competition’s social media strategy.”
There’s no doubt the company is legitimate, but just because they are, it doesn’t mean the extension is worth your time.
Signing Up
To sign up with UpVoice, you will have to connect your Facebook account. Unfortunately, there is no other way to sign up. You will also need to be comfortable installing a Google Chrome extension.
To qualify, you must be at least 18+ years old and reside in the United States meeting a certain demographic that isn’t mentioned on the site. At this moment, there is no mobile app available, but the company did mention they plan on an app in the future.
If you’re comfortable with that, then you will just want to head to the official website and click on the “continue with Facebook” button to start. It’s right on the front page.
In connecting Facebook, the app will have your name, profile picture and address.
After you allow Upvoice to connect to your account, it will then ask you to create a profile, in which you will enter your name, email a few other details, just as you would with any other survey-like website.
In submitting these details, you will then be asked to install the Chrome extension as long as you’re deemed eligible.
As mentioned, to use UpVoice, you will need to use a Chrome browser and keep the extension active in order to qualify. They also ask, as seen in the screenshot above, that your ad-blocker is disabled so that it doesn’t interfere with the extension.
Installing the Upvoice Extension
In order to start getting paid with Upvoice, you will need to install the Chrome extension.
To do so, you can follow through with the link mentioned at the end of your registration process or you can do so via the company’s official Chrome extension link.
When I went to add it, Google warned me that the app will read your browsing history, read/change your data on a number of website as well as notifications. By now, however, you should know this as the extension was designed to track your web history as you go about your day.
Adding the extension is extremely easy, and once you do, you should see the Upvoice logo in the upper-right hand corner of your browser. It will look something like this…
How Does Upvoice Work?
Once the extension is installed, Upvoice will walk you through a quick tutorial, letting you know that they will anonymously collect the ads that they see and give you daily tokens in doing so.
At this moment, you will collect tokens whenever you visit the following sites:
- YouTube
- Amazon
To earn tokens, it’s simple. You just need to surf as you normally would and just make sure you have the extension installed.
How Much Can I Make?
According to the company, it will take one month to earn 300, a $5 value, if you visit a participating site every day. When you sign up, they will give you 300 tokens, a $5 value, making it easier to get to your first payout.
So, doing the math, this means you can earn about 10 tokens a day as long as you visit a website mentioned above. In total, that can be about $5 a month or $60 a year since every 300 tokens are worth $5. However, you can earn bonuses throughout the year, inching that total a few dollars higher.
Is it worth it?
That’s up to you to decide.
As you don’t have to do much, is that $60 a year or $5 a month worth giving up your ad/surfing information to a third-party?
Redeeming Your Rewards
Once you earn 600 tokens, a $10 value, you can start the redemption process to get your free gift cards. Some of the gift cards include Amazon, a prepaid Visa gift card, Nike and many more. You can view the full list of rewards here.
To check your balance as well as what you can redeem your tokens, for, all you need to do is click on the extension logo in the upper-right hand corner. It will bring you to a dashboard like this:
Here, you can check your balance as well as see what it will take to cash out for. You can also view your statistics, which show you the max weekly tokens you’re eligible for.
So, as I was writing this, I could only earn a maximum of 70 tokens a week, about a 10 token a day average as mentioned.
Even when you visit a participating site, it will take a few minutes for your dashboard to reflect that.
The Pros and Cons
Lastly, I want to mention the many pros and cons I found online. As in all of my posts, I like to see what the internet is saying just so that you can get an outside view, aside from mine.
In this section, I briefly mention the pros and cons from multiple third-party review sites.
The Pros
- extremely easy to sign up
- get paid to do nothing
- 300 token ($5) sign-up bonus
- low cash out threshold
- huge selection of gift cards
The Cons
- limited earning potential (caps out at $5/month)
- privacy issues
- only open to U.S. residents
- no mobile app
Final Thoughts
5/10According to the company, they only collect your name, email and basic demographic information for the purposes of communicating with you. They also collect non-personal data such as a random generated device ID and user ID as well as general demographic information. In short, all of the data is said to be anonymized and aggregated, so no one will ever be able to identify you.
Seeing this company focuses more on advertising campaign insights more than your habits, I could be certain that they care more about the ads you’re seeing rather than what you’re posting on your Facebook wall.
While this is a cool extension that pays you about $5 a month, I personally am not going to use it as I don’t like the idea of an extension track me around the internet as I go about. Sure, I get sites already do this, but why add to the madness? Not only that, but I don’t visit a lot of those participating websites on some days since I don’t use this particular computer all of the time, so that means I would probably make less than that $5 a month amount.
In the end, I don’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t steer you clear, either. As long as you know you’re being tracked and the company wants to crawl the ads you’re seeing, then by all means, let them track that. If you feel it’s worth about $5 in gift cards every month for technically doing nothing, then it may be one to look at. You could at least download it and run it for a full month to at least cash out for a $10 gift card. If you like it, keep going. If not, you can uninstall it in seconds.
For now, I will leave the platform to you.
Have you used this extension before? Did you make money? Am I missing anything?
As always, you’re more than welcome to vent in the comments below.
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Google has just disabled UPVOICE extension because it contains malware.