Vizu Answers announced a $2.9 million round of financing today for its poll based market research, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Marketers can conduct self-serve polling campaigns by designing a poll, picking a demographic, and having it syndicated to relevant publishers’ sites, who get a kick-back for listing the poll by CPM varying by placement on the page. It’s like poll-based AdSense. Publishers can set a minimum CPM for the types of polls they’re willing to show in that poll zone. Sites that run a series of diagnostic demographic polls for their users can command higher rates. You can see some sample polls here.
It seems odd that Vizu pays on an impression basis, when the value to marketers comes from voting, although both methods are subject to fraud. Vizu does track click-through rates for each site and provide this data to marketers planning campaigns. When there isn’t a poll matching the contextual profile of the site (CPM rate, demographic, and textually), Vizu fills the space by running a poll that relates to the page’s text to keep readers accustomed to the feature.