Looks like Google is getting into the Survey Business
From Neiman Journalism Lab:
Google appears to be experimenting with a new paywall-esque content roadblock for publishers, and it’s not One Pass. For lack of a better name, let’s call it a “survey wall,” because instead of dollars the system asks readers a question before they can move on to continue reading what they like.
This could get interesting. Instead of a standard paywall, people may be able to ‘pay’ for content by answering survey questions. The publisher gets valuable information it can on-sell to advertisers, and Google dulls the old-media knives that are increasingly aimed at its vital organs. A natural extension of this would be that the publisher would become a survey panel provider of sorts. Survey companies would be able to buy access to the survey-wall to ask their own questions for a fee-per-answer. There is also no reason why independent panel companies could attempt to step into the role Google appears to be playing as the third-party technology provider.
Of course, there are big questions about the quality of data that may come from these distributed surveys.
- Would people answer honestly?
- What can reasonably be done with one or two answers from each visitor? (e.g., it would be difficult to examine relationships between more than a couple of variables)
- Why would we expect people who visit survey-wall sites to be representative of a given population?
davidwallacefleming 9:00 on Friday, November 11, 2011 Permalink
Valuable information to stay appraised of. Thank you. I hope this does not get implemented.