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.'"
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.
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:Poison! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.