Top technology advertisers are finally catching on to the fact that we are kind of obsessive here at TechCrunch in our technology coverage and so are our readers. In fact, they’re want to understand why TechCrunch is such a big deal to so many different types of people (we do too.) To help them get a better understanding of us, we’ve constructed a quick 20-question survey that will help them get a better sense of how today’s leading start-ups and enterprises use social media, business and personal technology, and how TechCrunch influences your thinking about key strategic trends.
Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey. We’ll publish the results here on TechCrunch.
You’ll remember that back in May, we said thank you and good bye to our third-party sales agent, Federated Media. Heather, our CEO, decided our network metrics were strong enough to stand on their own. Turns out she was right (again).
Since May, the TechCrunch network has added nearly 3 million additional readers and 6 million pages views. Our September audience stats now stand at more than 10.5 million unique readers (7 million from our sites and 3.5 million from RSS) and more than 22 million page views.
To handle our network growth, we’ve hired Vaughn Brown as Sales Director. He comes to us from IDG where he was most recently working on the InfoWorld and Industry Standard brands. You can reach him at vaughn [at] techcrunch dot com to discuss custom programs and sponsorship ideas. And as a reminder, you can also buy impressions direct via our self-serve platform, hosted by isocket.
Thanks for reading and for keeping us growing. Please fill out the survey so that advertisers can understand us better and we can keep paying our writers to serve you better.
(Photo credit: Flickr/Robbert van der Steeg).
Nice job TechCrunch. Please keep pumping out the great content and another 6 million PVs will come quick
Erick, market research firms will pay big money for the thoughts and opinions of TC visitors. Companies like Microsoft, HP, intel, Google, Dell, Epson and others pay research firms to conduct surveys online. United Sample helps those research firms find the right people at the right time. Survey takers are paid real cash for their time. If TC is interested in a new source of revenue from research, then please contact me. Thx. Matt
If I could afford to advertise on TechCrunch I’d be so rich I wouldn’t need to.
more real analysis, less marketing suckup.
the survey was pretty lame. Some of us have to deal with real business stuff rather than just gadget fluffing. Whole survey is just a front to sell to some marketing dweeb at some mobile services company. Not that I oppose it since I understand you have to pay the bills too. At least put some effort into making it less obvious.
Saving grace around here is that there’s always a few diamonds in the rough. There’s plenty of other sites for gadget porn and sucking up to Apple, Twitter, or whatevers. I’d like to see deeper insights into what these new companies bring to the table rather than “look at this pwetty interface” crap.
more pro/con thoughts, not just simple reposting marketing material.
that survey seems like it might suffer from similar problems as the YouTube rating system…
http://www.tech...gs-are-useless/
I am no satastician but just off the top of my head I would suggest trying to do some kind of QIPM (Quality Improvement Priority Matrix.) It would be more work, but the end result would be much more informative.
the intent was never to gather actual opinions. It’s just to brag to some marketing dweeb how rich and “mobile savvy” the audience is, and how they should buy many many impressions so we’ll buy more of their crap.
I understand the need for it, but I just find it insulting that the “survey” was so poorly done.
So are you saying that with this survey TechCrunch is contributing to the very overall approach that was railed against in this post…?
http://www.tech...s-kill-the-cpm/
I did notice that when I went to search for this post, I was fed only 10 search results at a time, which is lame, and only serves to drive up page impressions and to pressure me to find another source for what I’m looking for, which is useful information…
Still, Schonfeld is pretty clear about the intent of this survey, so I’m not sure why it would need to be ‘disguised.’ I’ll grant you that while he does list very specific objectives for the survey, he also suggests it has an open-ended objective of ‘understand why TechCrunch is such a big deal to so many different types of people’ and in that respect the survey is disappointing.
Personally I completed the survey because the blog post asked me to, but the data I gave was misleading because the available options simply didn’t apply to me. Taking the survey did give me the impression that TechCrunch doesn’t appreciate how diverse it’s audience may be. I think there are probably dozens of different motivations and benefits that readers find in reading TechCrunch and dozens of different ways the information here contributes to purchasing decisions, and so if you ask 100 people what they get out of TechCrunch, you might only get 10 similar answers.
People who are buying ad time/space are looking for the most bang for their buck, and unfortunately the way advertising contracts are written (at least in traditional media, I don’t know about web advertising) that means the most homogeneous audience… obviously an advertiser doesn’t want to pay for reaching X number of users when less than 100% of those users are the target demographic. The important thing is for the administrator of the medium to NOT try to achieve a homogeneous audience. One need only look at music radio in the united states to see the devastation that can happen when modern statistical quality control is leveraged; Maximizing utilization of available advertising time is achieved via maximizing the homogeneity of the audience, which is achieved via music and DJs which exhibit minimal variance, variance being a key component of creativity…
If advertisers actually do make purchasing decisions based on the data from this survey, well then I guess they are as disconnected as you seem to think they are. :- )
The survey obviously doesn’t employ any statistical control, doesn’t conform to even basic statistical methodology, and so the results obviously won’t be too useful. One problem with surveys is the significant variance you get in how a given user responds to a given question. One common method is to pose the question multiple times with various wordings so as to measure this variance. I wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective to simply give the survey via an opt-in emailing, and to give it to each user two times separated by a time period of a week. This might maximize opportunity for variance in the answers, allowing you to pick out data from just those users who exhibit minimal variance.
In our indignation we’re perhaps loosing sight of the possibility that a survey maybe can’t measure or give adequate voice to the passion or obsession that some of us have about technology? After all that’s a subject that would be fodder for a doctorial thesis.
Elliot, what a very well thought out post. Made some good points. I started taking the survey myself, but stopped after the second question seeing how boxed in it was. My reaction was pretty much the same as Lex’s above.
> So are you saying that with this survey TechCrunch is contributing to the very overall approach that was railed against in this post…?
>
> http://www.tech...30;..l-the-cpm/
the post is written by a guest author so I doubt it’s the official TC position. Besides, CPM is still the default metric for paid ads at the moment, and you can’t force the whole industry to go your way unless you’re a monopoly.
if you want demographics, be up front and ask for it. I want you guys to sell ads so I’ll be more “valuable” as a demographic group and companies will spend more time and resources making products I want.
Sticking the silly thing in a survey and wrapping the whole post in a “we care about what you think” slant is amateurish and insults our intelligence.
That survey makes me think I should not be reading this blog… It made a lot of assumptions about the type of readers you have. Wrong assumptions
survey FAIL. Not all TC readers are CIO’s. I have no idea what the top three factors are from preventing my organization from putting 100% of its enterprise applications on “the cloud.” Too bad that’s a required question, and there’s no ‘I don’t know’ or ‘n/a’ option.
Ditto. I don’t know my company’s annual technology budget either. And I’m kind of shocked there wasn’t a job title of “Software Engineer” or even “Programmer.” This survey is horrendous.
Even if you can answer this question… Shouldn’t cost be an option?
Not all TC readers have anything to do the enterprise, either. The survey doesnt even cover your entire readership, which I would agree would be hard to cover with one single survey, considering the breadth of the audience. Maybe job title / background should be the first question and later questions based on that.
Cheers
Suchit
I agree. While I do have a small start up, most of the questions seem to be about businesses that have existed for more than a year and enterprise mid to large businesses who use tech.
not for the average reader who is into technology… but there are “normal” questions for those who are just readers and are not in the IT field or have there own business
ugh… i bailed on the survey. questions were silly as were choices. and to think i had been willing to “waste” my time on the survey.
I’ll do the reader survey if you guys let me add stuff on CrunchBase lol
http://www.crunchbase.com/
Survey is flawed.
Reason not all apps are in the cloud is not all the apps I use have a cloud version available.
How can a question asking whether I’ve retweeted, emailed, read comments, etc. be mandatory yet have no “none of these” option.
Demographic questions should not all be mandatory.
Easier to just quit the survey in the middle, so your results are skewed.
Mandatory questions about person income??? No thanks. I answered up to that point.
just lie. i i did.
Very enterprise heavy on one side and then it asks you how many apps you have on your iphone. Is this some kind of joke survey?
There is nothing in this survey which will help TC understand ‘how we tick’ as Erick puts is.
This is a shame for TC as you have fluffed up an opportunity to get some real value from your audience. I for one wont bother filling another survey in the future.
As all marketing people knows ever chance to interact with your customer/reader etc. is a chance to delight, discover or sell something to him. This survey failed on all of these points.
your survey sucks.
the household income question is mandatory (I lied, fyi), and the options for “why I read techcrunch” are self-glorifying and obnoxious. you should have put in some free-form response areas, especially for that one.
This is a badly designed survey. The choices do not include all the reasonable alternatives. It’s like “How often do you beat your wife? A) Daily, B) Twice Daily, C) Every time she needs it.
Agreed with all the other comments on the survey’s quality. As someone that works in market research the least you could have done is provide some don’t know or NA options rather than forcing respondents to answer a question based on your assumptions.
As a market researcher who deals primarily with enterprise technology companies, there were quite a few questions in the survey that made me cringe. I could see where you were trying to go, Eric, but next time, please get some input from a professional before you deploy. You’ll get much better data for it – both in accuracy and in depth.
Soapbox: There are some incredible and inexpensive/free online survey tools out there. But just because they are available doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it without counsel, for exactly the same reasons I wouldn’t let my lawyer to code a website, nor ask my mechanic to extract a tooth, even though the HTML and the scalpel can be had for free.
Just $.02 from someone who has see too many good ideas undone by bad research.
According to to TC only internet enabled phones exist… since I either:
A) pay for data or
B) have a flatrate
Someone just overlooked most mobile phones that are out there… the sort of phone which sends messages and makess phone calls and nothing else. So much for skewing your data.