Large multinational corporations and consumer brands spend big bucks on market research, and for good reason. Figuring out what consumers are thinking about and what they want can help inform crucial product development and marketing decisions.

If you're an entrepreneur or small business owner, having access to similar market research insight is probably a very appealing proposition, but the costs typically put that market research out of reach.

From Google:

You can create an online survey in minutes, have responses within hours and fully analyzed results in days. We do all the heavy lifting for you, finding interesting nuggets of information (or “insights”) and providing you with tools for digging deeper.

Here’s how it works: people browsing the web come across your questions when they try to access high quality content like news articles or videos. Answering the question gives them near instant access to the page they want. All responses are anonymous; they aren’t tied to users’ identity or later used to target ads. This provides an alternative to the traditional paywall model: site visitors don’t have to pull out a wallet or sign in, publishers get paid as their site visitors respond, and you gain insight into what people think -- for just $0.10 per response for the general US population or $0.50 per response for custom audiences.