An accidental posting on YouTube of a demo video by Google has let the cat out of the bag regarding the upcoming Google Insights targeting consumers. From the 53 second video and non-descriptive title, I can only describe what I can see/hear. It seems Google is enabling people/businesses to target the US Internet audience for surveys at a price. Ominously titled “Answer a question to continue reading this page”, it seems Google is going to bring the ability to paywall content to the masses.
Wait, I can do even better than describe the now-removed video. I can show it to you! Embedded after the jump.
Never mind, Google deleted my video uploads. I suppose I could upload them to Vimeo instead of YouTube…
Google.com/insights/consumer is currently resulting in an Access denied page. I would expect an announcement from Google within the next few days regarding this.
Will AdSense sites be able to get in on this revenue stream? And more importantly, will people prefer answering quick questions to view content in place of ads?
With this new direction released so shortly after their “Screenwise” program, Google seems to be working different angles to find revenue, usability testing, and connecting the two.
Update: Google has cleaned up the video titles and they currently exist as unlisted videos. In addition to the earlier video, you can see how to retrieve the results of your survey from the next video.