Survata (YC S12) replaces paywalls with "surveywalls"

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/20/yc-backed-survata-wants-to-replace-paywalls-with-research-friendly-surveywalls/

by ckelly • 14 years ago

64 42 14 years ago

endianswap• 14 years ago

I think it's a great idea, especially in lieu of a paywall, but I honestly can't think of that many websites that have paywalls. Maybe I just avoid them naturally?

It also seems like this could be useful for free versions of iOS apps, as advertisement replacements (or supplements.)

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

Isn't this just a fancy ad? A lot of sites already have lightbox Javascript popups (that AdBlock can't block?) that acts as ads or gateways to getting your email address.

awenger10• 14 years ago

I agree that the lightbox experience is common, but I view the surveys as fundamentally different than advertisements. Part of our idea is that your attention is more valuable than a banner/video ad. If I had 30 seconds of time from a smart HN reader, I'd rather ask for advice than show a commercial. Hopefully getting at that valuable opinion will allow you to get better free content online.

And, just to be clear, we're keeping the surveys fully anonymous; so we will not collect or tie to an e-mail address or other personally identifiable information.

Ataraxy• 14 years ago

This has been done to death in the incentive based affiliate marketing world for some years now.

The quality of data that will be generated from these surveys is going to be extremely poor and I would be interested in seeing how they're able to sustain advertisers (market researchers).

vailripper• 14 years ago

The article mentions some ways they plan to catch bogus data, but I agree that I'm a bit skeptical they can make it work consistently.

ktsmith• 14 years ago

I'll second this, we put together a system that did this around 2008 and while it worked out well initially within less than a year it became a loss for our company. We couldn't charge much for the data as even with large amounts of filters and detection techniques for bogus data and users the results were so bad no one was willing to pay for them any more. Within a year we scrapped the project and ripped it out of our ad system. People are more than happy to answer a survey to get to paid content, they are also more than happy to supply bogus answers to the questions.

That being said, I'll be interested to see what, if anything, makes this different than all of the surveys running in the affiliate marketing/lead generation space.

awenger10• 14 years ago

We agree that maintaining data quality is the biggest challenge and really the crux of this business. We have initial filters that look for incorrect answers to "checker" questions (e.g. What browser are you using? In which time zone do you live?), an outlier response speed (too slow or too fast), etc. And we're working on a more sophisticated system to really address this.

Data quality with initial partners has been good. We'll be working hard to keep it that way.

dm8• 14 years ago

Interesting idea. Google is already doing this (http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home) and they have solid relationship with big publishers. Question to founders - 1. How are you different from Google? 2. As a UX person, I'm not sure what sort of data I will get from these surveys. Is there anyway you can maintain the quality of responses? I assume in most of the cases users will give dummy data for the sake of getting away from surveys.

jedc• 14 years ago

And I think the solid relationships with big publishers is the big part that's hard to replicate.

That said, you could probably more easily approach smaller (more local?) publishers that are more willing to experiment to get traction. Is that what you're planning on doing?

kunle• 14 years ago

Would also say, there are tons of blogs out there with dedicated readerships in niche, but high value demographics (to advertisers). This is perfect for them.

awenger10• 14 years ago

Thanks for the interest. Google Consumer Surveys does have a similar model to ours. There a few things that differentiate us now:

1. Our minimum spend is only $10 vs. $100 for Google; lower minimum brings in a group of people who want to get a "quick read" on an issue (e.g. ask 100 people an opinion on a new logo design or tagline)

2. Starting soon, we'll be offering advanced behavioral targeting. For example, you could select a target audience of active young mothers, Honda car owners, or online shoppers.

3. We're allowing multi-question surveys (up to 4 questions). Each respondent answers all questions in your survey, which enables cross-tabulation of responses (e.g. looking at how respondents who answered "Yes" to question 1 respond to question 3). Google is currently focused on 1-2 questions at a time.

In the coming months, we hope to differentiate ourselves in other areas, in particular data quality.

MetalMASK4• 14 years ago

No.

You probably don't need a degree in experimental psychology to understand that forced recruitment gives you invalid/biased/low quality data. These surveys are annoying to the users; more importantly, the data provided has little if at all value to the organization behind the survey. No matter how well you design your survey.

I don't even want to start on how bad/biased some surveys are designed.

The only way the survey business is still in business is because it is so distant from the revenue. If your ad campaign doesn't boost sale, you pull your ad away. Bad survey's uselessness are not so explicit so people still trust that "something can be gained".

No, stop creating useless data from online user. If you want insights on usage, do analytics on server logs. If you want feedback on user experience, do a serious experiments and plan to spend some ten thousand bucks on it.

colmvp• 14 years ago

"You probably don't need a degree in experimental psychology to understand that forced recruitment gives you invalid/biased/low quality data."

Interesting point. Anecdotally, I am less honest with my selections if I'm taking a survey specifically to get a reward (i.e. contest, Kongregate points, access to a site), as I usually just want to get it done with as fast as possible.

However, if it has tangible results (i.e. will tailor my experience on the site like Netflix) then I am likely to spend more time choosing honestly.

masterzora• 14 years ago

Even the honesty of your answers is not the only issue. One of the big ones is that the set of people opting in to a survey is already demonstrating a characteristic different from the set of all people of interest unless the people of interest are for some reason "the set of people opting in to a survey". This alone is enough to muddy or even invalidate the output data.

rabidsnail3• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection

rabidsnail3• 14 years ago

There are cases where surveys are useful, but none of them hinge on getting accurate results. The two that come to mind: push polls, and exploiting sample bias to make yourself look good.

awenger10• 14 years ago

I've enjoyed the recent 5-hour ENERGY ad about how many doctors approve of their product. A whopping 73% of doctors recommend low calorie energy products... when measuring the percent of those who recommend energy products.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCqT3fdAAHQ

While there are abusive uses like push polls and leading questions, there are legitimate uses too.

kcl• 14 years ago

You seem to be evaluating this company based on either A. how it would work for you personally, as someone who isn't interested or B. an inaccurate assessment of how it would work for other people who aren't you. When discussing a company you typically try to avoid both.

For instance, many girls like dolls, but if you don't like dolls that doesn't make dolls a "No." business, and it's not illuminating to hear why dolls are icky. A better discussion would be how and what makes a new doll appealing (or unappealing) and whether it can compete with Barbie.

Clearly the online survey industry is making some money. Certain parts of the web, which may not target you, rely on surveys. Combining surveys and paywalls, if not perfectly novel, is at least interesting. The combination raises a host of issues and potential problems which your comment ignores.

Your being off-base would not quite matter as much if it wasn't so rude to the team that worked on this. Did they do a good job in their implementation? I don't know, it hasn't come up yet.

MetalMASK4• 14 years ago

My argument is targeting at the whole "survey" business, not this or that dev team in particular. I would much prefer the dev team here to do a great job, "fixing" the broken online survey business instead of adding on to it. If you are part of the dev team, I apologize for the confusion.

Not sure how the "doll" analogy applies here. When a doll sells, even to a small proportion of population, it sells. When you do an online survey, you gain very little true insight. You definitely will gain more insight from the two alternatives I mentioned (analytics on logs, properly designed experiment).

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying the whole online survey industry is wrong. Amazon Turk is wonderful, so is SocialSci. My company actually use result from Turkers for building models. The premise for that to work is a well designed experiment with qualified turkers. A survey that replacing "paywall" basically means you do not have a clear targeted recruitment poll. You get basically anyone who pays your website a visit. Survey result from that, in my humble opinion, is worth as much as server log analytics.

p.s.: I think you meant "You are being off-base" instead of "Your being off-base" but I really want to avoid discussion on grammar on HN.

awenger10• 14 years ago

Thanks for the interest, and sorry for the delayed response.

We certainly hope that the surveys are not annoying. We know that some people will prefer to pay, but others (like me) would rather take a few seconds to complete a survey than pay. Our hope is that the surveywalls will let users access content that otherwise would have been beyond their reach. And at the same time, quality content publishers will be able to make money off their work.

As to the researcher side, we agree with you that nothing beats revealed user behavior when optimizing web sites or apps. But it's not cheap or even possible to A/B test in other situations.

Suppose that you're a restaurant owner and want a new sign for your building. It's not practical to purchase two signs and see how alternating the signs affects business on different days. And it's also not in budget to spend $10k or more on a traditional market research survey.

Or if you're a politician, you can not wait until voting day to see which of your various ad campaigns worked in different districts. You need proxy measurements.

Companies already ask these types of questions using traditional approaches like panels and phone polling. We provide a cheaper way for them to do it online. All approaches have built in biases, and we're working to account for the biases and quality issues in online polls. As you point out, we'll have to do that to succeed.

MetalMASK4• 14 years ago

Thanks for responding to my, as noted by others, rather "rude" critique. I think you guys are building something distinctive from the surveys on AmazonTurk, SocialSci, because your recruitment poll is not chosen. Turkers went to amazon with the idea to properly do survey, your survey might took the user by surprise.

A few suggestions: 1. Hire someone with experience on experimental psychology, I mean, by trade. Not necessarily a PhD but at least with some experience and has knowledge of the textbook experiment errors. Just one of those would help the design a long way. 2. Throw in some free analytics tools/result for the organization behind the survey. As you mentioned, restaurant owners and politicians might just want to run the survey for some straightforward result, well, not all surveys have straightforward result, even when designed well. Some analytics/visualization tool, e.g., manyeyes from IBM, doesn't really take a lot of dev time but would be quite impressive in the eyes of your customers (i.e., the politicians or restaurant owners).

Best of luck, Alex

revorad2• 14 years ago

I'm curious to know what bad personal experiences you've had in conducting surveys to dismiss them completely. When was the last time you ran a survey and why did it fail to deliver the results you were expecting?

Also, please can you take it easy on the tone? See this discussion - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747

Edit: Analysing server logs can tell you what people did, not why they did it. At least in my experience, surveying users directly about their motivations and needs has been very enlightening and resulted in a direct increase in sales.

MetalMASK4• 14 years ago

thanks for the feedback on the tone. See constructive suggestion in my reply to awenger.

one comment on the survey vs. server log comparison: Survey also doesn't give you "why" on user behavior; it only give you what the user "thinks" the reason is. For certain occasions it provide false insights. Server logs are facts, you won't get why but you get concrete observations.

zio992• 14 years ago

Survata, how about a sticky to the top of the site? Just a thought - it'll be easier on the mobile crowd.

zio992• 14 years ago

And demo that survey sticky on your homepage. I've answered side-bar surveys before and I'm more honest in my answers than when I'm trying to get behind the wall.

awenger10• 14 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion. We'll be moving to and optimizing for mobile soon. (I'm a Survata co-founder).

jjacobson• 14 years ago

People hate taking surveys. The only reliable way to get data out of people in survey form is to ambush them on the phone or in person and pressure them into answering some questions for you. And even then, the data has to be filtered appropriately. Paywalls and most online polls are the wrong place to ask people serious questions.

vasco• 14 years ago

This is just content locking with lipstick on, which was up until now among tactics such as cloaking and keyword stuffing, at least in my view. Hopefully they'll make it less scammy. If I could just do a 1min survey to access premium content that would be fine, but my fear is that I would have to go through 1min surveys for stuff that I now get for free.

DanBC• 14 years ago

This seems like a really neat idea. I'd be happy to do a short (20 second) survey to get access to content. I'd much prefer to do a short survey than watch some of the pointless stupid annoying ads that Youtube is giving me at the moment. And there's little chance of me taking year subs for all the sites I read maybe once a week.

Survata should be aware that any longer than that, or poor content hidden behind the survey-wall, means that I'm likely to just click random options on the survey. But I'm sure they are.

Good Luck to them!

Really, someone 'just' needs to fix micropayments.

awenger10• 14 years ago

Thanks for the support, Dan.

memset• 14 years ago

The neat use-case I see coming out of this is enhancing an onboarding process.

I work for a company which sells wine online, and a large number of people have strong preferences about the types of wines they like (red, white, chardonnay, half-cases, etc.)

It's useful to give people a survey - combined with an explanation of how the site works - as they are signing up. Even more useful is to use their answers to show the new customer a wine which is suited to their tastes. (If you like high-end reds, it wouldn't make sense to show you a half-case of inexpensive white wine to convince you to make you first purchase.)

And if our marketing department can manage their survey, marketing copy, and graphic design without having to ask developers every time they want a change (or if they can save me the time of writing a customizable interface) then all the better.

Onboarding. That's where it's at, yo.

The idea of surveys as a paywall mechanism (eg, New York Times paywall with a survey) is, at first glance, pretty unappealing, because paywalls are de-facto abhorrent. But we'll see; I may not mind filling out a 4-question questionnaire in order to read an article that would otherwise be blocked. Especially if I know that after filling it out once, I will never ever have to fill the survey out again.

And let's not forget about the adult industry! Instead of captchas... well, why not get some interesting marketing analytics out of the deal?

Interested to see how this evolves!

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

it would be nice to have an example that you could run through several times. i tried the football example once and then wanted to see how it handled incorrect answers, but wasn't going to start searching for cookies to delete just to re-enable it...

killahpriest• 14 years ago

Doesn't Wufoo offer this already?

tomjen3• 14 years ago

I hope this doesn't catch on. At least with youtube ads adblock can block them.

Survata (YC S12) replaces paywalls with "surveywalls"

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