Newspapers partnering with Google surveys

Google Survey Screen Shot

Starting Sept. 1, online readers of Clovis Media Inc. will be asked to take a short survey to access full versions of stories.

The company that owns the Clovis News Journal, Portales News-Tribune, Quay County Sun and Cannon Connections is partnering with Google to implement a survey component on its sites.

"A lot of news websites are going to paywalls," Shane Adair, CMI advertising director, said. "We didn't want to go to a paywall, but we wanted to recoup some costs of our online business."

Google, Adair said, works with companies looking for market research, and news sites are attractive survey points because of various groups who read online news. Individually, the newspaper receives fractions of a cent for each survey, but the total impact helps defray hosting and staffing costs for the newspapers' websites.

When the system is implemented, a news story will show the first few paragraphs, then require a reader to answer a multiple-choice question to see the rest of the story.