7 ms·

Survata (YC S12) replaces paywalls with "surveywalls"

64 points by ckelly 14y ago

zio99 14y ago
Survata, how about a sticky to the top of the site? Just a thought - it'll be easier on the mobile crowd.
- zio99 14y 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.
- awenger 14y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. We'll be moving to and optimizing for mobile soon. (I'm a Survata co-founder).
endianswap 14y 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 14y 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.
- awenger 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- awenger 14y 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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dm8 14y ago
Interesting idea. Google is already doing this (http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home 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 14y 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 14y 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.
    - awenger 14y ago
      Have you wiretapped our office? While we hope to work with big publishers too, niche blogs are an awesome place to start. As you say, they provide a self aggregated group of individuals with a common interest. They're perfect for polling.
- awenger 14y 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.
MetalMASK 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
  - rabidsnail 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection
- 14y ago
jjacobson 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- awenger 14y ago
  Thanks for the support, Dan.
memset 14y 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 14y 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...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
killahpriest 14y ago
Doesn't Wufoo offer this already?
oo 14y ago
It would be easy to write a Web browser extension to automatically do the surveys with random choices in order to bypass the surveywall. And as the surveys are anonymous, what if some evil user or competitor deliberately cheat or manipulate the results over net?
tomjen3 14y ago
I hope this doesn't catch on. At least with youtube ads adblock can block them.

64 points by ckelly 14y ago

zio99 14y ago

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

zio99 14y 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.
awenger 14y ago
Thanks for the suggestion. We'll be moving to and optimizing for mobile soon. (I'm a Survata co-founder).

endianswap 14y 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 14y 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.

awenger 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
awenger 14y 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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

dm8 14y ago

Interesting idea. Google is already doing this (http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home 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 14y 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 14y 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.
  - awenger 14y ago
    Have you wiretapped our office? While we hope to work with big publishers too, niche blogs are an awesome place to start. As you say, they provide a self aggregated group of individuals with a common interest. They're perfect for polling.
awenger 14y 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.

MetalMASK 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- rabidsnail 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection
14y ago

jjacobson 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

awenger 14y ago
Thanks for the support, Dan.

memset 14y 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 14y 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...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

killahpriest 14y ago

Doesn't Wufoo offer this already?

oo 14y ago

It would be easy to write a Web browser extension to automatically do the surveys with random choices in order to bypass the surveywall. And as the surveys are anonymous, what if some evil user or competitor deliberately cheat or manipulate the results over net?

tomjen3 14y ago

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