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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!
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.
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
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
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
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.
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?