You seem to be evaluating this company based on either A. how it would work for you personally, as someone who isn't interested or B. an inaccurate assessment of how it would work for other people who aren't you. When discussing a company you typically try to avoid both.
For instance, many girls like dolls, but if you don't like dolls that doesn't make dolls a "No." business, and it's not illuminating to hear why dolls are icky. A better discussion would be how and what makes a new doll appealing (or unappealing) and whether it can compete with Barbie.
Clearly the online survey industry is making some money. Certain parts of the web, which may not target you, rely on surveys. Combining surveys and paywalls, if not perfectly novel, is at least interesting. The combination raises a host of issues and potential problems which your comment ignores.
Your being off-base would not quite matter as much if it wasn't so rude to the team that worked on this. Did they do a good job in their implementation? I don't know, it hasn't come up yet.
My argument is targeting at the whole "survey" business, not this or that dev team in particular. I would much prefer the dev team here to do a great job, "fixing" the broken online survey business instead of adding on to it. If you are part of the dev team, I apologize for the confusion.
Not sure how the "doll" analogy applies here. When a doll sells, even to a small proportion of population, it sells. When you do an online survey, you gain very little true insight. You definitely will gain more insight from the two alternatives I mentioned (analytics on logs, properly designed experiment).
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying the whole online survey industry is wrong. Amazon Turk is wonderful, so is SocialSci. My company actually use result from Turkers for building models. The premise for that to work is a well designed experiment with qualified turkers. A survey that replacing "paywall" basically means you do not have a clear targeted recruitment poll. You get basically anyone who pays your website a visit. Survey result from that, in my humble opinion, is worth as much as server log analytics.
p.s.: I think you meant "You are being off-base" instead of "Your being off-base" but I really want to avoid discussion on grammar on HN.
Analytics and experiments will tell you 'what' but will rarely tell you 'why'. That's the data you can collect from quantitative and qualitative surveys.
For instance, many girls like dolls, but if you don't like dolls that doesn't make dolls a "No." business, and it's not illuminating to hear why dolls are icky. A better discussion would be how and what makes a new doll appealing (or unappealing) and whether it can compete with Barbie.
Clearly the online survey industry is making some money. Certain parts of the web, which may not target you, rely on surveys. Combining surveys and paywalls, if not perfectly novel, is at least interesting. The combination raises a host of issues and potential problems which your comment ignores.
Your being off-base would not quite matter as much if it wasn't so rude to the team that worked on this. Did they do a good job in their implementation? I don't know, it hasn't come up yet.