Virtual Currencies Attract Users to Online Surveys
Peanut Labs recruits people from social networks to take online surveys. While some online survey companies attract "professional respondents" through banner ads, which produces less reliable results, Peanut Labs is attracting people with cheaper, but more interesting, virtual currencies. By doing so, Peanut Labs is seeing response rates of 29%, which is four times higher than the industry average. And 80% of those respondents are choosing currencies for virtual worlds over cash or gift certificates for iTunes.

Byron Reeves at Stanford is doing research into similar uses for virtual currency as rewards for meeting work objectives or simply as incentives to open an email more quickly. It seems to be working.

"Why people might care, then, is that the human brain is not specialized to differentiate between virtual and real," he said at the Virtual Goods Summit in June. "Close counts. The same neurons fire when an avatar smiles at you as when a person smiles at you. The same dopamine is released when you’re rewarded with virtual money as real money. My interest is virtual money applied to real behavior. I think there might be some real uses for virtual money in the real world.

Whether that will work for surveys remains to be seen.

Bill Cook, SVP for Research and Standards The Advertising Research Federation is skeptical. But he does think Peanut Labs "has an idea which on the surface sounds very interesting and germane."