If you’re looking for a way to earn cash by playing trivia, The Trivia Bar app is a great place to start. The Trivia Bar features live trivia contests that you can play to earn money. You have to pay to enter any contest, either by paying a sum for access to the quiz itself or by subscribing to a monthly membership.
You don’t have to win to earn money—you merely must place amongst the top contestants on the leaderboard to get a chunk of change. And that chunk could be anything from $2 to $200, depending on the quiz jackpot and your placement.
At least, this is what The Trivia Bar app tells you when you sign up. I’m a skeptic, so I set out to find out whether you can earn money from The Trivia Bar, and if it’s enough to be worth your while.
Keep reading to find out all there is to know about The Trivia Bar. I’ll tell you if the app is legit, how to play, and the best-kept secrets for how to earn yourself some trivia cash. Scroll down to learn more!
Is The Trivia Bar App Legit?
From the get-go, I’m here to tell you that The Trivia Bar is legit. I was able to earn a payout, and though it took me a little effort and, frankly, much waiting, I’d say that it was worth it.
Read on to hear my play-by-play recap of my time using The Trivia Bar app.
Signing Up for The Trivia Bar App
To begin my journey on The Trivia Bar app, I signed up for an account. I gave my name and address and came up with a username and password to sign into the app. (Since devising the username and password, however, I’ve never been prompted for them, so don’t worry too much about remembering this info).
The Trivia Bar asked if I wanted a subscription to become either a Silver, Gold, or Platinum member of their Triviaholic program. Each of these tiers contained different perks—namely additional quizzes— for a monthly fee. I initially declined to subscribe, thinking this would be a more cost-effective way to play in their contests.
The Trivia Bar prompted me to select my favorite trivia topics, as seen here:
As you can see, most of these trivia categories revolve around TV shows and movie franchises. In other words, media connoisseurs are likely to have the most success playing The Trivia Bar contests. I selected the categories I felt most confident in and moved on quickly, eager to get into the throes of a trivia quiz.
These categories can be modified later, so don’t worry if you miss a category you’d like to play and want to select later. Additionally, the selections made here will only affect the featured quizzes you see when you open the app. You’ll have access to every trivia topic The Trivia Bar offers via the app’s homepage.
Another note: to receive a payout, you must provide your address to the app. If you aren’t comfortable with entering that much personal information, The Trivia Bar is not the app for you. You can still participate in their trivia contests without entering your address, but you will not be eligible to receive any money you earn if you withhold this info.
Choosing Your Contest
As soon as I finished making my profile, I expected to begin a trivia contest immediately. However, this was not the case. I arrived on a new page that listed a handful of featured quizzes, all of which were at least a few days away. What?
As it turns out, The Trivia Bar only features live trivia contests, and they don’t hold quizzes for every topic every day. Indeed, the majority of their trivia topics do not have any scheduled contests at any given time. Therefore, you may have to wait days or over a week to begin any quiz and even wait weeks for your favorite topic’s contest to be announced.
Additionally, because these quizzes are live, you can’t participate in them ahead of time, nor can you participate retroactively. Instead, you’ve got to commit to a quiz that you know fits into your schedule instead of one you may be busy during. Otherwise, you may have wasted a pretty penny.
And when I say a pretty penny, I mean it. Almost all the quizzes available without a subscription package cost $12 to $14 to enter—and that’s just for one entry. Many quizzes allow you to enter multiple times, but that means paying the entry fee several times over. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $70 to throw away just for five entries into a trivia contest!
My biggest issue with choosing a contest on The Trivia Bar app (and perhaps with The Trivia Bar app in general) is how few quizzes there were to choose from. I’d click on category after category, only to be informed that there were no upcoming quizzes for that topic. The few options there were frustrating, especially because I was itching to get to a contest!
After much ado, I signed up for a Harry Potter contest over a week away. It cost $14 for one entry, so I knew I had to study to make my entry worth my while. This quiz allowed up to five entries, which felt a bit wild to me—even the biggest Potterhead might not want to risk giving up $70 for a trivia quiz they might not win!
I was chomping at the bit to get to a trivia contest, but the only quizzes within the week were for subscription holders only. I decided to bite the bullet and get the Silver tier Triviaholic monthly subscription. For $4.99 a month, I’d have access to an increased number of quizzes.
The best part about becoming a Silver Triviaholic? Most of these quizzes were free, making this subscription very worth my while. Additionally, these quizzes were notated with a silver banner to make them easy to distinguish from their membership-free counterparts.
I could have paid more for a Gold or Platinum Triviaholic subscription—and gotten access to quizzes with higher prize amounts—but as a first-time user, I chose to make the smallest investment possible for the extra perks that yielded a lower reward.
As soon as I signed up for the Silver membership, I had access to an increased number of contest options. Granted, there were still only a handful of them, but even so, this was an improvement upon one open enrollment quiz every three days.
I noticed that, for the most part, the membership-only contests only allowed one entry per person, whereas the open contests allowed up to five entries, on average. This didn’t make too much of a difference to me, but to a trivia diehard who might be looking to stack the game, this might be a feature of note.
Anyway, now that I was a Silver tier Triviaholic member, I could choose other free contests. I chose the first featured quiz that popped up on the app: the Wacky Wednesday quiz, available for free only for Silver Triviaholics. There wasn’t much information about Wacky Wednesday, so I figured I had to wait until Wednesday to find out. I exited the app and planned to return a few days later for my first live trivia contest.
Gameplay
After getting a feel for the quiz options (and waiting a few days for my contest times to air), I began to compete in trivia contests using The Trivia Bar app.
Wacky Wednesday Quiz
Flash forward to the following Wednesday: I received a notification 30 minutes ahead of my quiz time reminding me to join the waiting room for the Wacky Wednesday contest. I joined a few minutes before the quiz began and was greeted with a countdown to the quiz, complete with some anticipatory techno music.
Once the clock ran out, the quiz began.
It’s important to remember that, on The Trivia Bar app, you can’t change your answer once you select it (I ought to have read through the rules of the app before beginning, but silly me, I did not.) I made a mistake on the first question and couldn’t change my selection though I realized instantly that it was wrong.
Additionally, I lost Wi-Fi service at the start of the game and was unable to go back and answer those questions. Keep put while playing a game on The Trivia Bar, or you risk losing out on valuable points that could earn you some money!
Below are some examples of questions from the Wacky Wednesday Quiz:
The quiz itself was developed well, with a wide variety of questions, fun music, and cool graphics. I quickly learned that Wacky Wednesday was a combination of trivia questions from all their categories as I played. Most of the questions were related to specific media franchises (TV, movies, etc.), and I felt like I was ill-prepared to answer questions about media I’d never consumed before. There were a few general trivia questions in there that I felt much more adept at answering.
I liked that The Trivia Bar showed an obvious countdown during every question so I could see how much time remained. The music also built up as the clock ran out, so I knew when I didn’t have much time left to answer just by opening my ears.
Another notable aspect of The Trivia Bar is its lack of glitches. Unlike other popular trivia quiz apps (*cough* Trivia Crack *cough*), there were no glitches that occurred during gameplay, nor were there any pesky pop-up ads. My experience playing The Trivia Bar has been entirely bug-free, as well. This alone made playing The Trivia Bar considerably more enjoyable than its competition.
I also liked that The Trivia Bar shows you the answer distribution for every question. It made me feel better when many of my competitors gave the same wrong answer that I had. Plus, it served as a reminder that I wasn’t in the contest alone.
Looking at the scoreboard for the Wacky Wednesday contest, I learned a few things about how The Trivia Bar app scores its quizzes. Players are ranked based on how many questions they got right, and ties are broken based on how long it took players to answer their questions.
Additionally, the pool of prize money doled out on The Trivia Bar depends on how many people enter the quiz, so if fewer than the maximum amount of participants sign up to play, less money will be distributed amongst the winners, and fewer folks have the chance to earn cash.
Harry Potter House Cup Quiz
A few days later, it was time for my much-anticipated Harry Potter House Cup quiz.
Heading into this quiz, I thought I was a Harry Potter trivia buff (see my contributions to Trivia Bliss’s Harry Potter content here and here) and that this quiz, labeled as for “beginners only” wouldn’t prove much of a challenge for me. However, once I started the quiz, I knew I was in trouble. Some of the Harry Potter trivia questions asked by The Trivia Bar were so niche that I had trouble keeping up!
Despite this, I did have much fun playing this quiz. Check out some example questions here:
After completing all 30 questions, The Trivia Bar tallied up my score: 18 correct answers out of 30. The leaderboard revealed that I placed 13th in the contest. So, I did better on this quiz, but still, $14 went down the drain to play it. (There’s plenty of free trivia here on Trivia Bliss, so it didn’t feel like money well spent.)
In addition, because only 20 people entered the contest, the $1000 max total prizes that had been a draw for my participation was more like $260. Indeed, only the top six players earned any money. The grand prize of $100 was given out, but after that, the prize money valued dipped steeply to reflect the fewer number of participants in the game. My 13th place didn’t stand a chance!
General Knowledge Quiz
On my third attempt to earn money using The Trivia Bar app, I went into choosing my contest prepared. I knew that I had little chance of earning money playing a niche fandom quiz unless I studied up, so I opted for the most Plain Jane of trivia contests: the General Knowledge quiz.
There were two General Knowledge contests coming up. One was open to all users of The Trivia Bar and cost $14 to enter, and the other was free to Silver Triviaholic members. Even though the Silver contest had a lower total prize money amount (a meager $15 would go to the first-place winner), I decided to take my exclusive perk and sign up.
This time, I was ready to compete ahead of time. I set myself up in a comfy spot right next to my router so there was less of a chance that my WiFi would disconnect. I didn’t feel stressed as the clock ticked down and the music began. Instead, I was calm and excited knowing the trivia fun awaited me on The Trivia Bar app.
When the quiz began, I did my best to answer all the questions as quickly as possible to avoid being displaced by a faster competitor. To my surprise, I knew almost all the answers, and for those I didn’t know, I made very good guesses.
Below are some example questions from the General Knowledge contest I participated in. They ranged from self-explanatory to quite specific but still managed to stay very general. I appreciated that these questions involved fewer fandoms and franchises—it made the quiz more accessible to me (and, I imagine, to others).
When I finished the game, I was greeted with a victorious banner across my screen: I came in second place!
With my score of 19 questions correct out of 20, I was now the proud winner of a whopping $10.
Check out the scoreboard for my game:
Receiving a Payout
Now that I’d earned money on The Trivia Bar app, I had to wait for my payout. I verified my address and my PayPal username. After this, I was told my money had been sent.
I’m always a little skeptical about earning real money from trivia apps, but to my surprise, I received my payout in less than 24 hours from when I’d earned it. Cha-ching!
It took me three quizzes, a little studying, and a decent amount of strategizing, but I was able to receive a payout from The Trivia Bar. It might be more trouble than it’s worth, but why not go for it if you’re a bored trivia buff?
Other Thoughts on The Trivia Bar App
Out of all the trivia apps I’ve tried out (and there have been quite a few!), The Trivia Bar is one of the most user-friendly. Sure, they make you wait a long time for their contests to air, but once you get into the quiz, it’s an easy app. Upcoming contests you’ve signed up for, and your competition history can easily be found via tabs on the bottom of your screen, and new contest options are featured every day via a banner at the top of the app’s homepage. The interface of The Trivia Bar was one that did not deter me from returning to play again, and that’s a win in my book.
Like other popular trivia apps, The Trivia Bar only offers multiple choice trivia questions in their trivia contests—no write-ins allowed here! If you’re looking to give an answer all on your own without help, The Trivia Bar may not be for you.
Additionally, The Trivia Bar felt like a haven for trivia fanatics like me. Even after only playing three quizzes, I noticed familiar usernames pop up alongside my username on the leaderboard. This could be due to a dearth of quiz options or just some coincidence, but it seems like many users on The Trivia Bar are so diehard that they enter most any quiz they’re eligible for. I liked seeing that commitment as I scrolled through the profiles of my competitors at the end of each contest I played in.
Final Words
There you have it! Our full review of The Trivia Bar app is complete. Yes, The Trivia Bar is legit, and with a combination of luck and skill, you can earn a payout.
The Trivia Bar makes you work for your money—and for good reason, because the app’s gotta be profitable to continue to run. That being said, if you can invest the time and choose your trivia quiz topics wisely, you can earn a few bucks.
If you’re invested in The Trivia Bar, save money by purchasing a subscription. You’re likely to shell out more for quiz entry if you aren’t a member of the Silver, Gold, or Platinum tiers and therefore are less likely to make back the money you put into the app.
Whether you become a subscriber or not, The Trivia Bar can provide you with intermittent spurts of fun trivia contests. You’ve got to be willing to wait a while for your chosen quiz to take place, but once it does, you won’t be disappointed.
Want more reviews of trivia apps and websites? Trivia Bliss is the place to be. Check out our blog archives, where you can learn all about Trivia Crack, as well as other trivia games and apps, like our ranking of the best Jeopardy!-style apps. And if you’re eager to find a new source of trivia, Trivia Bliss’s gigantic trivia database is the place to start. Challenge yourself with a themed trivia quiz or use our random trivia generator to make your own. Happy quizzing!
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