Vizu Answers announced a $2.9 million round of financing today for its poll based market research, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Marketers can conduct self-serve polling campaigns by designing a poll, picking a demographic, and having it syndicated to relevant publishers’ sites, who get a kick-back for listing the poll by CPM varying by placement on the page. It’s like poll-based AdSense. Publishers can set a minimum CPM for the types of polls they’re willing to show in that poll zone. Sites that run a series of diagnostic demographic polls for their users can command higher rates. You can see some sample polls here.
It seems odd that Vizu pays on an impression basis, when the value to marketers comes from voting, although both methods are subject to fraud. Vizu does track click-through rates for each site and provide this data to marketers planning campaigns. When there isn’t a poll matching the contextual profile of the site (CPM rate, demographic, and textually), Vizu fills the space by running a poll that relates to the page’s text to keep readers accustomed to the feature.
This is a joke. You have no idea who is responding and the polls consist of a single question, so it’s impossible to do any analysis. Evidently, the bright people at DFJ didn’t bother to ask anyone who knows anything about research whether this is usable for anything.
My thoughts exactly doug.
This is not a market research tool, it’s more like gimmicky advertising.
Potential advertisers will figure this out in no time and then it will be deadpool time!
I don’t want to playa-hate though - so well done to the vizu guys (and girls, maybe) for getting $2.9M for this nonsense.
There’s hope for all of us yet…
I think this is a neat idea.
This is a cool idea. Definitely beneficial for publishers, advertisers might need more convincing. It could work. I would put it on my blog.
Michael question for you? I am sure there are a million sites trackbacking to tech crunch(like mine), how do you moderate trackback links so only the ones you decide show up…any plugin or tools?
I can’t believe the case studies on Vizu’s site. As Doug and KH (and even Vizu’s site) point out, this tool breaks every rule of half-decent research, and companies like Cowen & Co are using it as a basis of “primary research” for investment advice?
I think this will be huge. To do quick research across a number of sites and get results back quickly is very advantageous. If people can’t see that, they are not seeing the big picture and have no idea how many companies could use this.
I took some of their polls and the experience was great.
Grats to Vizu,
I saw these guys present at STIRR earlier this month, its actually a very cool little app that seems pretty flexible, and they put on a great presentation that really highlighted how it might be useful for some areas of marketing and etc.
Good Luck Vizu team!
They can’t pay by the vote because the voting would be tainted by fraud. But unfortunately, the way they have to identify fraud is looking at how many clicks something gets per pageview (in addition to other things) so I don’t see how this is going to work. Fraudsters will have to vote to keep the ratios right, and those votes obviously will taint the pool.
I use vizu polls for communications with my company’s investors, supporters, and future customers. I embed the polls in my newsletter and blog and use the results to refine my business concept and demonstrate momentum around our industry and concept. The quick, easy way to achieve these benefits outweigh my fears that the data isn’t 100% clean.
Not sure why this post didn’t work before, but I think Vizu is great for publishers because the visitor doesn’t leave the site once they vote or take a look at a poll.