Surveys dominated by cheapskates

One of the first observations I made of Second Life was that there's three ways to get money ("Linden Dollars", or L$):

• Buy it
• Make something in Second Life and earn it (such as clothes, models, etc).
• Do online surveys.

The last one's an odd one, but there's hundreds of examples of it in Second Life. The first one I came across was the "Money tree":

What the heck. I decided to try one of those surveys. They pay anywhere from L$25 to L$500 (about US$0.10 to US$2.00) -- so, not a lot.

The survey I was confronted with was about mobile phones. Various questions ranging from what my current phone is and how often I use it, to how I perceive the manufacturer of various phone companies.

Obviously, there's some company fronting up money for these surveys. They aren't running the surveys themselves -- they're farmed out to third party organisations to find the "volunteers", and probably to compile the results for them.

In a survey you are making extrapolations based on the data you have. If the data you have is biased, then your extrapolations will be wrong.

So, it occurs to me that the "results" from these surveys will be quite biased. The respondents are solely from a demographic that plays Second Life, too cheap to purchase Linden, and not creative enough to produce their own wares. It makes you wonder: how many of the "statistics" you hear are generated from cheapskate Second Life players?