An alliance between market research firm NFO Research Inc. and one of the Web's most popular sites begs the question one more time: Which information is more important - content or data about who consumes it? Under the agreement announced Tuesday, Yahoo will be swapping access to its users for better information about who those users are - and getting "content" based on market research in the bargain.
"NFO is as plugged in with consumers as you can possibly be as far as knowing what people buy, what they want, and how many hours they sleep," says Yahoo's director of brand management, Karen Edwards.
Edwards foresees culling a wealth of rich data about Web users with the help of NFO's panel of 150,000 interactive consumers and its proprietary survey software. NFO's interactive sample is drawn from its enormous panel of general consumers; one of every 200 households in the US participates in NFO's market studies.
For its part, NFO will reap from the alliance the opportunity to solicit millions of Yahoo users to join the 75,000 households that make up its interactive panel. "High-tech is moving more in the direction of marketing and market research in order to differentiate themselves," says Charlie Hamlin, executive VP of research at NFO. "NFO wants to be a primary player in new media."
The most interesting byproduct of the NFO-Yahoo alliance, however, is the market researcher's agreement to provide "unique content" to the Yahoo site. Although she won't yet reveal the exact nature of the content, Edwards describes NFO's planned editorial contribution to the site's main pages as "entertaining and newsworthy." Says NFO's Hamlin, "We have information in the form of factoids. We can make content out of information we have and also create content by asking new questions."
But if these market "factoids" are a hit with readers, more valuable no doubt for Yahoo itself will be insights about both current Web surfers and future surfers who are not yet online. What search engines they like, what sports stats they most want to follow, and who surfs what during the lunch hour - answers to these kinds of questions make up the content Yahoo's marketers and advertisers are most likely to desire.
