If you've been in a position over the past few years of looking for, and failing to find, good B2B market research or lists, then this is good news. If you think that social, er, professional networking sites should be free from profit making ventures that utilize you and your personal data, then the news is not so good. At least online display advertising is transparent, right?
LinkedIn just announced its plan to utilize it's 30 million worldwide professional network for B2B market research. It will offer users incentives like cash, merchandise, and, for the more philanthropic of us, donations to charity, for participating in research opportunities.
It's not clear from the articles to date, whether LinkedIn will generate it's own B2B marketing list from the new opt-in surveys, or whether they are simply selling B2B survey opportunities. But in the database marketing arena, we've rarely seen one without the other. At any rate, the current iteration of their research network requires the person utilizing the service to harvest their own data by searching LinkedIn for qualified professionals, and then emailing them through LinkedIn's "InMails" to ask research questions.
A lot of people (OK, maybe only Gen Y-ers) still like to believe that everything on the internet should be "free." But the truth is, the buck stops at your eyeballs - and they're in high demand. All those Youtube videos you've been watching fetched $1.65 billion Googlebucks for its founders. Rupert Murdoch paid $770 million for your MySpace page.
A Linked-In company release estimated that the online survey market is worth about $900 million. I don't know about you, but my LinkedIn profile will be signing up for the cash rewards.
– Layne Salter
In my opinion the paid online survey market is a gold mine, I sure hope I can get in on it.
Posted by: paid online surveys | August 24, 2009 at 05:27 AM