Google Reinvents Micropayments — As Surveywall 107
Hugh Pickens writes "Frédéric Filloux writes that eighteen months ago — under non disclosure — Google showed publishers a new transaction system for inexpensive products such as newspaper articles. It works like this: to gain access to a web site, the user is asked to participate to a short consumer research session: a single question or a set of images leading to a quick choice. It can be anything: pure market research for a packaging or product feature, surveying a specific behavior, evaluating a service, intention, expectation, you name it. Google's size puts it in a unique position to probe millions of people in a short period of time and the more Google gains in reliability, accuracy, and granularity (i.e. ability to probe a segment of blue collar-pet owners in Michigan or urbanite coffee-drinkers in London), the bigger it gets and the better it performs cutting market research costs 90% compared to traditional surveys. Companies will pay $150 for 1500 responses drawn from the general U.S. internet population. But what's in it for users? A young audience will be more inclined to accept such a surveywall because they always resist any form of payment for digital information, regardless of quality, usefulness, or relevance. Free is the norm. Or its illusion. This way users make micropayments, but with attention and data instead of cash. 'Young people have already demonstrated their willingness to give up their privacy in exchange for free services such as Facebook — they have yet to realize they paid the hard price,' writes Filloux. 'Economically, having one survey popping up from time to time — for instance when the user reconnects to a site — makes sense. Viewed from a spreadsheet, it could yield more money than the cheap ads currently in use.'"
Old Idea, and Users Hate It (Score:3, Insightful)
And besides, if Google starts offering such service (again, these already exist and pay up to $1-2 per user, so much more than Google's $150 for 1500 users), the problems still continue. Users hate it and rogue webmasters put pirated content or fake aimbots and similar behind it, and people hate it even more.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
worthless stuff like news articles
I fear for our future.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
worthless stuff like news articles
I fear for our future.
Actually, I have fully stopped following news. I don't notice any difference. The only news I get are from slashdot. I still don't feel like I'm missing anything.
Re:Old Idea, and Users Hate It (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I have fully stopped following news. I don't notice any difference. The only news I get are from slashdot. I still don't feel like I'm missing anything.
You are. Do you know how I know that?
I follow the news.
Without news, you'd never find out about SOPA (Score:3)
The vast majority of people doesn't use the news in their day to day activities
That's the problem. Without some form of news, how would people become aware of legislative attacks on the public's freedom such as the PROTECTIP bill? Sure, this one in particular didn't hit the mainstream news media until the Wikipedia-led blackout because the movie studios co-owned by the mainstream news media would have benefited from it [pineight.com], but how else are people supposed to learn of legislative developments that affect their lives?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Someone to distill THOMAS (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're aiming way too low if your standard of quality is a /. summary.
Because you failed at word of mouth (Score:2)
They'll find out when their lives are affected.
At which point, Slashdot users are likely to tell people who complain about how a bill has negatively affected their lives that they didn't do enough to stop it from becoming law: "You should have encouraged everyone else in your circle of friends to call their senators and express disapproval of this bill. This bill passed because you failed at word of mouth."
Re:Probably someone else could work this out (Score:2)
I got a spirit message from Pierre de Fermat. He says he worked it out, but it's too long to post as a reply to an AC who will never read it.
Re: (Score:2)
Besides science discoveries, what of any importance is reported by the news?
If a person is aware of scheduled events they can read up on those topics (eg political activities, sport events, etc). It's really only late breaking details that might be missed and rarely are those so important as to require immediate attention.
Just because you don't read news sites or watch the TV; doesn't mean you are uninformed.
Re:Old Idea, and Users Hate It (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides science discoveries, what of any importance is reported by the news?
War. Pestilence. Famine. Death.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are already abroad in the world. And it matters that you know it. The electoral choices made by American people cast a long shadow - over the Middle East in particular, but over the world as a whole. And yet the US electorate is quite frighteningly ignorant of what happens beyond their borders. OK, I appreciate that part of the reason you don't read the news is that the principal news media available to you are on the whole dishonest, corrupt and trivial. But there are other news media (and news aggregators). The BBC, and many of the UK 'broadsheet' sites (e.g. [bbc.com]Guardian [guardian.co.uk], Telegraph [telegraph.co.uk]) are English language, well informed and honest (note: I did not say 'unbiased' - nothing human is unbiased). Al Jazeera [aljazeera.com] seems to be well informed and honest, too, and provides a usefully different perspective.
If we carry on as we're going, global warming and with provoking conflict, war, famine and pestilence will arrive in the United States in your lifetime. You have a duty to be informed - a duty to yourself, as much as to anyone else.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Even if we all gave up all technology tomorrow, and lived in little huts made out of clay and ate bugs for every meal, global warming will still happen (and maybe even an ice age right after that - any scientist worth their weight in sea salt will tell you that the planet has been both much hotter and much cooler, and will continue to go through such cycles, including dramatic changes in atmospheric O2 content.)
Even if we all became hippies tomorrow, wars will always happen. If not over oil, then over he wh
Re: (Score:2)
That's presupposing that the News is actually News instead of Entertainment as it is in the States. In other words, I don't consider it news when they interupt the damn weather forecast to show another idiot speeding the wrong fucking way on the damn freeway in L.A.. Hell it aint news to me when the interupt for the effen end of the world as I'm not a christian or someone who gives a damn about it. Just don't interupt my /. or god damn GW session
Re:Old Idea, and Users Hate It (Score:4, Interesting)
Add to that that ethics has gone out the door quite some time ago, and you now get the newspeak version of every story that best supports their corporate/political agenda and I would be willing to bet my life that you are not getting the news. What you are getting is slanted misinformation which you wrongly take to be mostly factual, when in fact nothing could be further from the case.
In other words, you are actually more misinformed than someone who doesn't pay attention to the misinformation. OTOH, if you are like most US Citizens then you won't let that little fact get in your way, because by now you have no doubt settled in on sources that tell you the stories you want to hear and believe.
Re: (Score:2)
You can follow mainstream media and not be suckered into be
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Having spend years reading newspaper(s) every morning for leads - like property purchases, planned construction, homes for sale ads in the classifieds, etc. - as a real estate broker I was pleasantly surprised when i got out of the business to find that reading the newspaper was an expensive, time-wasting, unnecessary, not-too productive habit. When news came online, nearly in real time, with enough details to satisfy any lingering curiosity, I stopped buying and reading them.
Having decided that watching TV
Already seen these (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, man, do these suck. I got a "to continue to your content, please answer these survey questions!" box popup a couple of weeks ago. I just entered some fake responses as soon as I could and clicked 'submit'.
Coming up next: survey responses that follow you around the internet, slowly building up a full profile. Erase your cookies, and it starts from the beginning all over again. Alternatively, it starts "personalizing" web pages for you based on your previous answers. I can only imagine what a web page would look like for a Latvian lumberjack who makes $10,000 or less per year.
Re: (Score:1)
I can only imagine what a web page would look like for a Latvian lumberjack who makes $10,000 or less per year.
I can't; what would it look like?
Re:Already seen these (Score:5, Insightful)
CPALead (Score:2)
IF [this proposed method adds only one click], then i can see there system working. Otherwise, its like you said, people just fake it, or leave, and find the information elsewhere.
Yeah, that happened to me once. I was browsing the web on a laptop running Ubuntu, and a Google search led me to some forum that was using the survey wall system formerly known as CPALead. It gave three options for offers to complete in order to continue, all of which required installing a free trial of a video game. I tried each of them, and none of them would let me continue because only users of Windows-based browsers qualified to download a Windows-based game. I would have had to try to install a Window
Re:Already seen these (Score:5)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
its meant to be fast and unobtrusive. 1 click and you are through.
If it is going to be 1 click then the fast and unobtrusive question will also have to be an efficient captcha, otherwise the system will be overrun by bots and faked accounts tasked to run up the bill.
Re: (Score:2)
It only needs to be as good as Adsense is at blocking fake ad clicks and views.
Google already has everything necessary for this; or they're already in trouble.
Re: (Score:2)
answer these questions' (plural) its 'answer this single question' (singular)
Well, I'm remembering how adds have been playing out: articles get spread out over several pages in order to show visitors more adds.
I'm picturing: "Before reading page 2 of 10 of this ten paragraph article, please answer the following question."
It makes good sense from the business side to implement this; users can't ignore it like they do with ads. Though, I'm sure after being annoyed with this system for a year, we'll click a radio button that appears before loading a webpage as automatically as we learn
Re: (Score:1)
I'd be good with this (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
If there's one thing internet users have plenty of, it's opinions.
Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks.
~~~~ Dirty Harry
Re: (Score:1)
I prefer a more nihilist, "Opinions are like assholes. Everyone's stinks, including yours and mine."
Re: (Score:1)
Wow, good stalker-memory - I don't think I've posted about that in ages.
I still stank by this opinion, of course.
Poison! (Score:5, Funny)
I love poisoning the data of market researchers! :D
Re: (Score:1)
I love poisoning the data of market researchers! :D
You beat me to it!
I was just going to say that giving deliberately deceiving answers is the best way to kill off this trend.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
How can we find out whether the answers were genuine? A survey, perhaps?
Re: (Score:1)
I'd expect browser plugin to be available to automate the process within a short time.
The equivalent to adblock which will fill surveys with random data and then load the content.
Re: (Score:1)
Too bad you can't write a program that will understand the survey and fill your answers with destructive content.
Re: (Score:3)
I love poisoning the data of market researchers! :D
I know, damn those corporations asking you what you want. The bastards.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You make a great point. Whenever a market researcher stands in my way on the street and refuses to let me pass until I answer their question I am always highly appreciative and make certain to give them a thoughtful, well considered, and accurate answer.
Momentarily running fist-first would be an appropriate response... ;)
Re: (Score:1)
A better analogy would be if they owned the street and you were trying to pass.
What the hell is up with your entitlement? You're asking for stuff from them, and they're replying with their terms. Why do you then have to go and be a giant dick and fuck with the process? Especially in this case, where they're specifically looking for feedback on how to make products better.
Douchebag.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I will answer fairly (almost) any question, for free, if the results will be publicly published. I will ask to be paid or poison the data otherwise. Sounds fair, no?
Re: (Score:1)
You're not answering it for free. You're answering it for access to the website. That's what you're being paid with. ... so yeah, it is perfectly fair.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I love poisoning the data of market researchers! :D
I know, damn those corporations asking you what you want. The bastards.
I tried to submit some opinions to a company once; only to get told that they only determine their product line up not by listening to people actually buying their products, but through the "focus group" method of marketing research. The problem is, their focus groups do not match their customers.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the whole point of using a large statistical basis in the research.
But, if each survey is tainted by selecting an outcome and guiding tainters to always be posetive, negative or some other deterministic viewpoint we can really taint the data.
Re:Poison! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Forced analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. What does the summary say? "The users make micropayments, but with attention and data instead of cash." This is no more a micropayment system than advertising is.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Our government likes to tax everything, including bartering. I wonder if they'll start taxing us for bartering our opinions away?
But what's in it for users? (Score:4, Funny)
Summary is both Funny and Insightful: But what's in it for users? ...uhmm they'll tolerate it, because they're young, broke and already trained.
Re: (Score:1)
or they might get off the Internet and go outside thereby making the world a better place. Hey, maybe google isn't evil after all.
Re: (Score:2)
1) If it "goes down" without this then down is where it belongs.
2) How about if a once semi-successful website "goes down" because of the decreased traffic which is certain to be the result.
Re: (Score:2)
But what's in it for users?
Content
This isn't micropayments and it isn't new (Score:5, Interesting)
Trading survey answers for content is not micropayments. It's missing the micro part and the payment part. It's something that only the very young, very poor, or very bored will do, and as such, it's a) not going to get a representative segment of the market, and b) going to turn away a lot of your visitors. People tried this back in the 90s and nobody was interested.
Re: (Score:3)
Trading survey answers for content is not micropayments.
It would be more fair to call it 'microbarter'. 'Payments' involves money or currency of some type (fungible consumption value being the important characteristic).
Re: (Score:2)
It's micropayment but not by the user viewing the content.
The company performing the survey is making a small payment to the website so a random 3rd party (you) may view the content. The customer of the website is the company performing the surveys.
Re: (Score:2)
It's something that only the very young, very poor, or very bored will do, and as such, it's a) not going to get a representative segment of the market, and b) going to turn away a lot of your visitors. People tried this back in the 90s and nobody was interested.
Depends on your definition of "very young." Id argue that in this case "very young" is pretty much anyone who grew up with the internet, probably 25 or less. While this is not a representative segment of "the" market (which market?) It does represent one of the marketers wet dreams (12 - 24 year olds) and a good chunk of the discretionary income. Not to mention that this "very young" will grow older with time. That is, most of the people who will freely give this information today, will also freely give it
Extensions (Score:3)
Extensions (Score:2)
Auto magical survey bypassing extension?
I've got one for you: and it is completely, 100% FREE!!! First answer these quick questions before you download to help us improve the quality of this service...
This fund wikipedia and open-source stuff! (Score:1)
My experience with Google Wallet (Score:5, Informative)
1) Buy "World of Goo" using my PC (!) for my shiny new tablet and set up a "google wallet",
2) 5 or 10 minutes later "congratulations, you've bought 5000 Happy Stars" for €8.99 (non-refundable), apparently my 5 year old kid clicked on something while playing "Sheeps & Clouds"
3) Attempt to fight this, what I consider to be a legalized scam, ended with nothing
In other words, if you set up google wallet 3rd party apps on Android OS can make payments without asking you for password or anything. It is amazing that it works that way since Apple had problem when remembering password for 15 mins. Google effectively "remembers" it forever, without even asking you once.
Re:My experience with Google Wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
Try blaming google less and consider it a cheap reminder to not let the tablet babysit your children.
If you really don't want to spend the time watching them setup a PIN for inapp purchases.
http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1626831 [google.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Let me guess, you have children?
Re: (Score:2)
Oh wow, because I don't have children I should not be pointing out bad parenting?
Next you will say I should tolerate your screaming kids out in public. I was a kid, I know what my parents did and how that worked. I can then see when your parenting is not working.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess your plan is to tie your children (if you ever have them) up ever time you have to go to the toilet? You can't helicopter them 24 hours of every day - so you remove anything that's dangerous enough to kill them and let them explore their world.
A tablet PC isn't dangerous except that you can spend a lot of money on it in ways which are DESIGNED to be attractive to kids. There's nothing else just sitting there in the house that can do it - even with an old-style phone it's pretty hard for a kid to d
Re: (Score:2)
The computer is another one. I have seen the results of unattended children and amazon one click.
Re: (Score:2)
Annoyingly, kids learn passwords really fast too - we haven't solved the problem that for at least the older parents today, technology wasn't a part of their lives growing up so much, and we don't have good processes for managing those risks baked into our habits.
Things that can cost money online just don't have the tangibility of real cash... and I don't have a super-good solution for that. Even my older and pretty internet-savvy kids happily start watching youtube movies when given a moment to check thin
Re: (Score:2)
You know what, I've seen your comments on other threads and sounding off about how other people live their lives without having walked in their shoes seems to be a theme. Oh well, carry on. Maybe one day you'll have kids and you'll realise that it's not quite the same as you imagined.
Re: (Score:2)
Try blaming google less and consider it a cheap reminder to not let the tablet babysit your children.
Wow... how is this letting the tablet "babsit" your children?
Perhaps I am sitting there watching my child play a game? The game pops up and says "Do you want to build the next floor for 10 bucks?" My child asks me, I look at the screen, and notice it is 10 pretend bucks. So I tell my child, yes. Then a few minutes later it says "Do you want to build the next floor for $100?" Again he asks, I say yes. It says "You don't have enough bucks, do you want to put $1000 for $10?" And he says yes... Is it my fault
Re: (Score:2)
So letting my child play a game DESIGNED FOR KIDS on a tablet, while sitting next to me, is "letting tablet babysit" eh? And that coming from a guy that apparently doesn't have kids...
No I should not discover that buying stuff USING DAMN PC auto-enchants 3rd party apps on my Android devices to charge me for whatever they decide to. Whoever came to that idea, knowing Apple's experience on this, is a damn idiot in my opinion and I can't trust company that is so frivolous with my
Re: (Score:1)
cheap lesson, turn off wireless before handing devices to kids unsupervised....
Firefox plugin (Score:2)
Like DoubleRecall with a twist (Score:2)
Microsoft's idea seems much like DoubleRecall, except there's a twist where they hope they can filter bad responses well enough to get useful statistics from survey responses. DoubleRecall just makes you retype advertiser's words.
Re: (Score:1)
Google is not stupid. They will not do that.
Looks reasonable (Score:2)
This actually looks like a pretty reasonable way to handle micro payments.
Missed the boat (Score:2)
Not interested in taking surveys all the time. And, 1500 for $150 sounds like a lot but is just 10 cents per person.
What might work is to be a low-margin middleman, their customer being individual content creators.
Could be a writer, a lone musician, a film-making project, a kickstarter project, a reddit-savvy game creator, a Public Lab spectroscope project, etc. Someone who is putting content on the web, for sale, but with a large or 100% free component. A band could host their music video as a torrent thus
not going to work (Score:2)
Survey pages (Score:1)
Ah yes, like the warez sites use to infect your machine... Yeah, I'm all for it...
Why don't these people just have the government mandate hardware keyloggers and direct access to our bank accounts so they can take what they think is a fair price for their content?
Re: (Score:2)
Or it could be that the sentence was first entered with "answer" instead of "participate" and then someone edited the word, forgetting to replace the "to". Calm down.
Passive Ads sales down? (Score:1)
That's it, force people to click on your ads.... isn't this what we use to do even though it was against Google's own TOS. Now your taking the shrwed ideas and making them your own. I'm glad you get the big bucks.