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I have done the survey. It's all about whether you have purchasing power in your lab and how much you have got. Can't figure out how any of that information would help the guys at CiteULike.
Posted by lucybuykx on 2009-11-10 18:18:47.
12 replies. Login or join this group to post to this thread.
It's mostly about demographics - what percentage of our users are X. If we know this we can focus more effectively. You will have noticed that we have started showing ads more prominently. This is an unfortunate fact of life as we need to get income (for this free service) from somewhere. Advertisers pay more - this is the "help CiteULike" bit - when they know the target audience. And the ads may annoy you slightly less if they're somehow relevant.
Thanks for doing the survey, BTW.
Posted by thegoose on 2009-11-10 18:50:49.
I did the survey too and I had the same feeling of being taken in. If this is supposed to be a serious survey about CiteULike demographics I wonder why there was not a single mention of the social sciences (?!) and only questions about lab equipment and DNA sequencing. For a moment I was tempted to conclude that CiteULike was selling its user base to some third party to conduct market research of no relevance whatsoever to reference management. Please prove me wrong and let us know about the results of the survey ;)
Posted by dartar on 2009-11-10 19:19:29.
ok, thegoose thanks for the extra edits and explanations - this makes sense, it just was not tremendously clear what you meant by "help" or "support".
Posted by dartar on 2009-11-10 19:25:15.
It's very tricky to get the balance right. We don't "like" ads any more than you - a necessary evil. But we felt maybe we could be forgiven for 1 survey after 4 years of free....
Posted by thegoose on 2009-11-10 19:32:39.
we forgive you (and I actually happen to like the huge banner on the left ;) )
Posted by dartar on 2009-11-10 19:54:11.
I don't mind ads or surveys and I greatly appreciate the excellent, free service. However, I think it could have been made clearer at the outset that this was a marketing survey and nothing to do with the CiteULike user experience. It felt a little underhand.
Posted by neils on 2009-11-11 00:07:32.
Agreed. I was looking forward to writing some positive comments about citeulike (basically about the ludicrously quick tech-support) but the marketing aspect only became clear as I was progressing through the survey.
Posted by tnhh on 2009-11-11 09:49:47.
We've changed the wording to make the purpose of the survey clearer. The reason we are asking everyone to take part in the survey is that potential advertisers need to know the demographics of the audience, and it makes a surprisingly significant difference to how much citeulike can charge.
Ironically, the words "help support" were chosen as a way to explain why we are doing this. I'm responsible for that wording, so I apologize to anyone who felt mislead.
Posted by kevinemamy on 2009-11-11 13:29:48.
The reason we are asking everyone to take part in the survey is that potential advertisers need to know the demographics of the audience
Fair enough, but why are the questions so skewed towards the life sciences? Many of my responses were blank, which provides no useful demographic information. Or are your potential advertisers only in the life sciences?
Posted by tnhh on 2009-11-12 13:56:03.
What we are planning to do is to replace some of the Google ads with ones supplied by an ad network that is focused on "Science". The skew in the questions is a function of the proposed network's bias I think, but they know more about how their advertising is sold than us. Computer Science is the leading category in the responses so far, by the way.
Posted by kevinemamy on 2009-11-12 14:22:35.
The survey is now complete; we have gathered enough data. Thanks to all the people who participated. Sorry again for the lack of clarity upfront.
Posted by kevinemamy on 2009-11-13 10:44:11.