Monday Note

How Google could reshape online market research and also reinvent micro-payments. 

Eighteen months ago — under non disclosure — Google showed publishers a new transaction system for inexpensive products such as newspaper articles. It worked like this: to gain access to a web site, the user is asked to participate to a short consumer research session. A single question, a set of images leading to a quick choice. Here are examples Google recently made public when launching its Google Consumer Surveys:

Fast, simple and efficient. As long as the question is concise and sharp, 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.

This caused me to wonder how such a research system could impact digital publishing and how it could benefit web sites.

We’ll start with the big winner: Google, obviously. The giant wins on every side. First, Google’s size and capillarity puts it in a unique position to probe millions of people in a short period of time. Indeed, the more marketeers rely on its system, the more Google gains in reliability, accuracy, 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, the better it performs. In the process, Google disrupts the market research sector with its customary deflationary hammer. By playing on volumes, automation (no more phone banks), algorithms (as opposed to panels), the search engine is able to drastically cut prices. By 90% compared to  traditional surveys, says Google. Expect $150 for 1500 responses drawn from the general US internet population. Targeting a specific group can cost five times as much.

Second upside for Google: it gets a bird’s eye on all possible subjects of consumer researches. Aggregated, anonymized, recompiled, sliced in every possible way, these multiple datasets further deepen Google’s knowledge of consumers — which is nice for a company that sells advertising. By the way, Google gets paid for research it then aggregates into its own data vault. Each answer collected contributes a smallish amount of revenue; it will be a long while, if ever, before such activity shows in Google’s quarterly results — but the value is not there, it resides in the data the company gets to accumulate.

The marketeers’ food chain should be happy. With the notable exception of those who make a living selling surveys, every company, business unit or department in charge of a product line or a set of services will be able to throw a poll quickly, efficiently and cheaply. Of course, legacy pollsters will argue Google Consumer Surveys are crude, inaccurate. They will be right. For now. Over time the system will refine itself, and Google will have put  a big lock on another market.

What’s in Google’s Consumer Surveys for publishers whose sites will host a surveywall? In theory, the mechanism finally solves the old quest for tiny, friction-free transactions: replace the paid-for zone with a survey-zone through which access is granted after answering a quick question. Needless to say, it can’t be recommended for all sites. We can’t reasonably expect a general news site, not to mention a business news one, to adopt such a scheme. It would immediately irritate the users and somehow taint the content.

But a young audience should be more inclined to accept such a surveywall. Younger surfers will always resist any form of payment for digital information, regardless of quality, usefulness, relevance. Free is the norm. Or its illusion. 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, but that’s another subject.
On the contrary, a surveywall would be at least more straightforward, more honest: users gives a split second of their time by clicking on an image or checking a box to access the service (whether it is an article, a video or a specific zone.) The system could even be experienced as fun as long as the question is cleverly put.
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 (I ran simulations with specific sites and varying parameters), it could yield more money than the cheap ads currently in use. This, of course, assumes broad deployment by Google with thousands of market research sessions running at the same time.

A question crosses my mind : how come Facebook didn’t invented the surveywall?

–frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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