National trade publication, LocalMediaInsider.com, this week ranked CivicScience #2 in its 2012 list of Top 15 Revenue Ideas for newspapers. The full article is only available behind a log-in but here is the important excerpt:
#2. Deploy a Civic Science poll
We’ve advised local media companies to utilize this free poll service (described here) in the past. Not only does it allow media companies to collect extensive audience data free of charge – it pays for any aggregated data it resells to national brands in the form of questions, such as “Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke.”
All the data is correlated, so that people who drink Pepsi and Coke, may also prefer cats over dogs. The local media has access to all the data on its market to use on sales calls (names of respondees is not collected), or sell questions to merchants needing data. The Post-Gazette has used this data for pre-testing its own editorial projects, selling question-based data directly to political campaigns, and saving a large automotive online buy via proving the online audience favored their brand.
One recent improvement is the ease of placing the code via a somewhat simple DIY code cut-and-paste. As we mentioned, data is co-owned so the newspaper gets access to all the marketing information, far more in depth than many of the more expensive services in use today.
We couldn’t be happier (unless of course we were #1) to get this kind of recognition in the newspaper industry. We are proud to support professional journalism in such a meaningful way.
