Political Drama Draws Alphabet-Owned Google Into Consumer Surveys
Google is using the interest surrounding the 2016 elections to vault more deeply into the political polling arena with its own polling service. Alphabet ( GOOGL ) subsidiary Google is offering its survey products to presidential and congressional campaigns — and getting them into newsrooms, according to The Hill. Google collects its data through survey boxes that appear online before people can read a news article, as well as through an application for the Google Android operating system that provides credits to the Google Play store to people who answer questions, The Hill reported. The product is known as Google Consumer Surveys. Nielsen Holdings ( NLSN ) also remains a major player in the survey industry. Online polling has long faced skepticism, however, since most Internet polls rely on self-selecting groups of respondents. Getting a representative sample including the elderly or poor, for example, can be difficult since they are less likely to have Internet access and would be excluded from sampling as a result. On the other hand, getting voters to participate in phone-based polling is becoming more difficult. The rate of people responding to phone surveys had already fallen to less than 10% in a 2012 Pew study , according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Google specifies that its sample is representative of the population on the Internet, according to the report. Google makes money from the surveys, but its data work also keeps the search company’s brand prominent in the political conversation. “As we started to get ready for the 2016 cycle, that’s when things really started to pick up a bit on my side,” Karen Sheldon, the Google account executive on the sales team for the product, said in The Hill’s report. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have both used Google’s tools for political polling, and the company has struck a longer-term partnership with the Independent Journal Review, a right-leaning news website that has attracted attention for its viral videos starring presidential candidates, The Hill said. Other Silicon Valley companies focusing on political polling include SurveyMonkey, which The Hill said hired Mark Blumenthal, a well-respected pollster and writer, away from the Huffington Post in October. SurveyMonkey has a partnership with NBC News to produce polls for the 2016 election. Alphabet stock was up a fraction in early afternoon trading in the stock market today , near 764. Image provided by Shutterstock .