Peanut Labs

Peanut Labs is a surveying/affiliate lead/advertising company from the makers of XuQa. LiveJournal is using them to run surveys, which appeared 2007-02-23. See the Peanut Labs Profile Survey for the questions the profiling survey asks.

About Peanut Labs
For companies, PL markets itself as a way to market with Generation Y--ie, people born between 1980 and 1997 (the demographics say they have huge amounts of money to burn). For publishers, they croon "You could be monetizing your users better in 72 hours from now." To prove it, they provide this handy guide. The need for eligibility includes: "You must have some way to communicate with individual, registered users (such as on-site messages or emails) on your site. And you need to have some kind of incentive system (point, virtual items, community rankings, premium content, locked features etc)." Their promises are pie high in the sky: "$1-2 / active user / month", specifically:

"We payout $3 for each completed survey"

"We payout between $0.5 - $15 for each successful lead"

Their commission is 15%-25%.

Peanut Labs Surveys on LiveJournal
The survey page can be found here: http://www.livejournal.com/misc/peanutlabs.bml

It explains:

"This survey program is powered by Peanut Labs Inc, a leader in online market research. The content served may contain a mixture of surveys, text, graphics and/or video content. Peanut Labs and the content served are not in affiliation with LiveJournal. Participation in any surveys is completely optional. Any information you provide in these surveys will be used for market research purposes by Peanut Labs only. No personal information is required other than your email address, which will be used for the sole purpose of new survey notifications. Please see Peanut Labs' privacy policy for more information about how your data will be collected and used."

(However, the email address is not actually required--it is optional. You just won't get notified about new surveys.)

Survey taking is promoted to Basic, Plus, and Early Adopter users through an ad on the homepage and a button ad. The reward is a $1 gift certificate to the LiveJournal Gift Shop.

If the payout quoted in the brochure guide is correct and the commission is taken from it, LiveJournal gets a possible $2.25-$2.55 for each survey taken by its members. It's possible LJ's possession of a relatively large member base might earn a commission on the lower end of their scale. Peanut Labs estimates their system will give those participating a new survey once every couple weeks.

However, speculation remains on how popular the option will be, given that the only thing available for $1 at the Gift Shop is a Virtual Gift. The lowest amount of Paid account time a user can purchase without an automatic payment schedule is 2 months at $5, the equivalent of taking 5 surveys. If a user took surveys once every two weeks when they came up, it would take them about two and a half months to earn two months of paid time. Meanwhile, LJ would have make $11.25 - $12.75 in survey payouts. Note that the price of all merchandise in the Gift Shop to begin with includes the cost of the item, the cost of credit card fees (not applicable when paying with gift certificate money), and an unknown, but reasonable, profit margin. In short, LJ makes more money from a user paying for an account with surveys than if the user whips out their credit card and pays for it outright.

If the payout estimate is correct, and a survey taking user takes one survey a month, that's high enough to exceed a paid user's dismal revenue, which are at the dismal level of $1.67 a month before credit card fees, with only a mere survey done by a user once every month. And that's in addition to the already existing advertising revenue made off of nonpaid users.

Technicalities
The surveys are served from Peanut Labs inside of an iframe. The calling URL takes the form of

http://peanutlabs.com/userGreeting.php?userId= 5115540-36-404e3173c4

Where the bolded section consists of the UserID, the number 36, and an as of yet unknown 10 digit hex number, separated by hyphens. (The hex number might be a function of the UserID. If not, Peanut Labs would need to know all UserIDs and their accompanying hex numbers to be able to detect a defective ID, like they do now.)  It is unknown whether LiveJournal gives Peanut Labs the privilege to look up who owns a particular UserID, but they do get that number, so it's certainly possible if necessary. This URL can be found by looking at the source of the survey page on LiveJournal. Anyone who knows the URL can operate the survey whether they are logged in as that user or not.

The surveys depend on the user's IP to determine their location. Users not in the US receive this error:



However, if the give someone with a US IP their Peanut Lab URL as mentioned above, the surveys load.

The surveys do not appear to be compatible with Safari; they never load.

Issues

 * Will LiveJournal be content stick to the surveys only like they have so far, or will go all out into the leads as well? And the video ads, when they come?


 * Peanut Lab's privacy policy states: "If you are under 18, you should not participate in our panel or use our site unless a parent or guardian is present....Children over 13 should only provide us with personally identifiable information if they have explicit permission from a parent or legal guardian." However, it does not make any other attempt to notify underage users taking its surveys that parental permission is required.


 * While Peanut Labs reassures the potential marketers that "filling out multiple profiles dilutes a respondent's reward", isn't it possible that determined multi-profile users would do the survey for each journal and thereby inflate the results? What happens to abuses of the system?


 * With Google recently involved in a wee bit of criticism for profiting from advertising on torrent sites, one wonders if Peanut Labs is at risk due to their clientele, which includes places like TorrentReactor.net, BTJunkie.com, Fulldls.com, and other torrent sites. Rather ironic since almost all the available torrents displayed on the front page of these sites are copyrighted material being shared, and the Xuqa network's terms include the standard disclaimer CYA boilerplate prohibiting the distribution in any way of copyrighted material.

Posts on this Topic

 * I, for one, welcome our new survey overlords
 * Peanut Lab Profiling survey now up