PaidViewpoint is a proprietary panel designed, built, and managed by aytm since 2011. It's exclusively available to aytm clients, doesn't participate in any external marketplaces, and year after year is rated #1 by respondents globally on independent sites like SurveyPolice. By keeping this community exclusive to aytm, we ensure that PaidViewpoint panelists are treated fairly and not exposed to overly long, crippled, or mobile-incompatible surveys.
To extend reach beyond PaidViewpoint's own membership, aytm also offers blended mode, which augments PaidViewpoint with Trusted Partner Panels to reach 100MM+ consumers worldwide. PaidViewpoint is always filled first. Partner panels are added only when your targeting or sample size calls for them, and they get their own layer of protection, described below.
In This Article
- Where Your Respondents Come From
- Bot Detection and Prevention
- TrustScore℠ and Consistency Verification
- Fraud and Cash-Out Safeguards
- Traffic Sentinel: Screening Partner Panel Traffic
- Data Centrifuge: Response-Level Checks
- Your Role: Rejecting Responses and Giving Kudos
- Respondent Trust and Satisfaction
- Seeing It All in the Data Quality Report
Where Your Respondents Come From
When PaidViewpoint alone can deliver your sample, your study is fielded entirely on our own panel. When your targeting is narrow or your sample is large, the platform automatically brings in Trusted Partner Panels. There's no separate ordering step. The Target Market sidebar shows an AYTM BLENDED or AYTM CURATED badge when this happens.
Different safeguards apply at different stages. The table below shows which ones cover each source:
| Safeguard | PaidViewpoint | Trusted Partner Panels |
|---|---|---|
| Bot detection at registration and login | Yes | Managed by each partner |
| TrustScore℠ consistency verification | Yes | No |
| Cash-out review | Yes | Managed by each partner |
| Traffic Sentinel (survey entry screening) | Not needed (covered by the safeguards above) | Yes |
| Data Centrifuge (response-level checks) | Yes | Yes |
| Your own review (rejecting responses) | Yes | Yes |
Bot Detection and Prevention
A number of technical safeguards are in place on PaidViewpoint to identify and prevent bots from taking client surveys, including IP/cookie verification, login pattern analysis across connected accounts, reCAPTCHA, honeypots, and uniqueness and validity verification of phone numbers and PayPal accounts.
TrustScore℠ and Consistency Verification
PaidViewpoint is managed by TrustScore℠, an automatic system of consistency verification. It's easy for a human to stay consistent across profiling questions when they're telling the truth, but virtually impossible for a bot to handle questions formulated in slightly different ways (e.g., "Do you own a dog?" vs. "Do you own a pet?").
Respondents with higher relevancy, historical responsiveness, and better TrustScores receive more survey invitations and larger incentives to recognize their thoughtful participation.
⚠️ Note: TrustScore applies to PaidViewpoint panelists only. It isn't available for respondents from Trusted Partner Panels in blended or curated mode. Those respondents are screened by Traffic Sentinel and the Data Centrifuge instead.
Fraud and Cash-Out Safeguards
If someone successfully bypasses all of PaidViewpoint's safeguards (highly unlikely), it still takes approximately three months to reach the cash-out threshold, after which a cash-out specialist reviews and approves the request. Random checks and automatic red flag notifications are in place for anything out of the norm.
Traffic Sentinel: Screening Partner Panel Traffic
Traffic Sentinel is the first line of defense for respondents arriving from Trusted Partner Panels. It screens every attempt to enter your survey and blocks bad actors before they can start.
- How it works: Traffic Sentinel combines device fingerprinting, persistent identifiers, graph analysis, and network intelligence to recognize the same person across sessions and panels. It works even in private browsing mode and detects VPNs and proxies.
- What it blocks: duplicate entries (the same person trying to take your survey more than once, including through different panels) and people on an exclusion list (for example, respondents excluded because they took a related survey).
Blocked attempts never reach your data. Your Data Quality Report shows how many attempts were blocked and why.
Data Centrifuge: Response-Level Checks
The Data Centrifuge is aytm's automated data-quality engine. It runs on every response, whether it comes from PaidViewpoint or a partner panel. It scores each respondent against a set of fraud and inattention checks, such as low-quality, copy-pasted, or AI-generated open-ended answers, failed attention checks, speeding, straightlining and other response patterns, and answers that duplicate another respondent's.
The Centrifuge runs continuously while your survey is fielding, then once more in full when fielding closes. The final run is the one that compares each respondent against the rest of the sample. Respondents whose combined score crosses the quarantine threshold can be quarantined, which sets them aside so they're excluded from your analyzed data.
💡 Tip: Adding a quality-control (attention-check) question to your survey gives the Data Centrifuge one more signal to work with. See Data Quality Control Checks for how to write one.
Your Role: Rejecting Responses and Giving Kudos
You know your topic best, so your review is part of the quality loop too:
- Reject a response you don't trust. We take that feedback seriously and limit that respondent's ability to take future surveys.
- Give Kudos to the most thoughtful responses. We pay a surprise bonus to the most useful respondents, which motivates them to keep leaving meaningful answers.
Respondent Trust and Satisfaction
Over time, we've earned our respondents' trust. PaidViewpoint panelists know that we follow through on every promise, and that even if they are screened out, they'll receive at least a minimum incentive as a token of appreciation for their time. This approach ensures high panelist satisfaction, outstanding response quality, and fast fielding times.
Seeing It All in the Data Quality Report
Every survey's results include a Data Quality Report that shows these safeguards at work on your sample. To open it, go to your survey's Stats page and select the Quality tab in the sidebar. The report covers:
- PaidViewpoint: the panel your sample is built on.
- Traffic Sentinel: how many duplicate or suspicious entry attempts were blocked.
- Data Centrifuge: how many responses were quarantined, and for which reasons.
- Human Review: the responses you rejected, the Kudos you gave.
- Survey Performance: how your survey performed in the field.
For more information on how our panel works and our worldwide reach, email support@aytm.com to request a copy of our Sample Quality document or Panel Book.