Slashdot Mirror
Google Reinvents Micropayments — As Surveywall
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.'"
This is an old idea. There already exist such services for webmasters (like ShareCash.org) and people universally hate having to fill surveys or fill forms before getting something. It's not even worthless stuff like news articles, some people put full movies (illegally, of course) behind such and people still hate it.
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.
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If there's one thing internet users have plenty of, it's opinions. Plus, maybe it will improve the products I buy down the road.
I love poisoning the data of market researchers! :D
I wouldn't call this system "micropayment". It's more "adwall that you have to interact with to pass". You've swapped out watching a video for filling a survey, whoopee.
Step 1 has been accomplished. ...
Step 2 is now underway
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.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It will be a race to see who can write the quickest/wittiest browser extension/plugin to automagically fill in these surveys. Once it becomes transparent to the users, the marketing data will be total crap. Bonus points though for the developer that gains market share, then flips the evil bit and tailors the survey results based on the what the survey customer wants to see.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Another survey tool I can pollute with false info, just to make sure that if it is tracking me all over (we are talking google here) then it gets no valid/contradictory information.
If these projects just add a special "surveywalled" donation page, this can actually be a good thing for wikipedia and open-source projects. If someone wants to help and doesn't want to spend money you just have to link them an otherwise useless locked page. Now shareware and freeware stuff could also have it. Anyone who wants to donate, just go there. Everyone can still enjoy the content for free.
For what it's worth (and maybe a warning to others):
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.
So when will someone write a Firefox plugin to automatically answer these surveys? Of course, you shouldn't answer any survey with what you are, alway answer with what you want to be. That way it's apsirational.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
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.
Think about how this could grow. Answering a single question to proceed is not that bad, but what if it's compounded by question after question. Twenty five questions in you get the "your almost there, don't quit now" just to answer 5 more before you can read the article, watch the video, whatever. If that becomes the norm it's going to really hamper what people view on the Internet. I know for myself I'd probably just give up and quit.
When I take an online survey, I lie vigorously in every question. I say the things that will make the surveyor most likely to accept my opinion, and then I tell them the exact opposite of what I really believe. Everybody should do this, because surveys are just more spam. Those people have no respect for us.
This actually looks like a pretty reasonable way to handle micro payments.
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 incurring no storage fees. A company making a game (with free demo) for the OUYA. A team making a crowd-funded TV series. These creators can get a limited time free boost when the initial news story comes out on some major blog, but to get a long-running buzz they can pay a small amount to put up ads. Not just the kind of ads you want to ad-block, but the kind that deliver to you immediately the actual media you want. Payment could be handled on an honor system, full payment required each time, or some kind of token based system. Something like a wallet.. if only someone invented one of those.. Actually it could be more interesting to Google to just to make the platform, take a small cut and make a real instant global micropayment system. Could be the next VISA.
If people want to get to something right now and you delay them, the answers will be rushed, random crap. That's just how the internet works. If people complain all the time about even having to type in "robo-scrambly letters" then I think think they're going to sit back and give insightful, carefully thought out answers when they want to read a news story instead.
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, but how else are people supposed to learn of legislative developments that affect their lives?
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?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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 Windows-based browser in Wine, and instead, I just said the heck with that.
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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
" the user is asked to participate TO a short consumer research session"
Huh?
I think the AMERICAN author (who is illiterate like half of Americans nowadays) meant "participate IN".
What is it with you Americans and prepositions? What about 'that', 'than' and 'then'? They're now interchangeable, apparently...
Sure, citizens can read the bills as they're posted on THOMAS, but most people still need someone to read THOMAS and come up with an executive summary of the provisions of each bill. That's the sort of news I was talking about.
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."
I'm fine with this. I just click on whatever the first selection is without reading the question or the answer.
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.
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