How Survey Sites Make their Profits
Survey sites are either part of full-service market research companies or provide services to market research companies. They make their profits in exactly the same way as any market or opinion research company does: by selling their services to customers such as businesses, non-profit organizations, academic institutions or government departments that want to conduct a market or opinion research project based on survey methodology.
A survey is a research technique that gathers data by asking a series of mostly closed questions (ie questions with answer options provided) to a group of people (called respondents) large enough to allow for conducting statistics analysis on the data collected in the survey.
Companies pay for market research because they need information on which to base their strategic decisions, and good information is essential to decisions that will generate further profits for the company: be it testing of new products or assessing the reactions to an advertising campaign, checking the customer satisfaction or finding out where gaps in the market might be.
The phase of the project in which the questions are asked and the respondents answer them is called fieldwork. What survey sites do, essentially, is provide INTERNET-BASED FIELDOWRK SERVICES, either to an external customer, or to another part of the same organization
Many survey sites are sub-divisions or are own by the biggest market research organizations in the world AC Nielsen, the largest market research firm in the world, owns Pinecone research panel. IPSOS has its own online panels in many countries, and so does Harris research. Lightspeed panel is owned by Millward Brown, and so on.
The survey sites make money by selling a package consisting of the following three most important elements. The first one is the platform, or the software used to design questions, receive the answers and often provide basic analysis of the gathered data. The second is the address list, or the panel of potential respondents that will be used to address the questions to. The third is the technical and professional expertize required to design the questionnaire and formulate the question, the answer options and the overall construction of the questionnaire in a way that will allow for gathering reliable data which will be usable in the further analysis of the results.
Internet research is a relatively new area in the market research practice, but it has grown immensely in the last ten years or so thanks to an increasing penetration of the Internet access among the populations as well as growth in high-speed, broadband Internet technology that makes it easy and painless to send and complete the surveys as well as use prompts such as images, sound and video.
Nowadays, Internet surveys are perfectly legitimate way of reaching respondents and Internet studies are used in more and more areas of research.
Internet is particularly suitable as a tool to reach niche groups which would be incredibly difficult to reach in conventional ways (ie by telephone or face to face interviewing). It is especially useful in surveying early adopters and savvy technology users, but as its penetration increases, more and more subjects can be reliably researched using online survey techniques.
The payment to the respondents answering questions is part of a costing of each research project, and as the respondents are normally paid significantly less than an interviewer directly interviewing a respondent would be (either by telephone or face to face), Internet fieldwork is normally cheaper than other ways of gathering data, although extra costs are associated with quality checks and data processing.
To make handsome profits, survey sites have to provide a quality product, and to do that, they need to know how to formulate questions, how to achieve response from required groups of people and last but not least how much payment to offer to respondents to encourage participation, but to limit the number of fraudulent answers.
