Tech giant Google (News - Alert) Inc. announced today its newest product aimed at market research gathering called Google Consumer Surveys. The new product is an alternative to paywalls, offering publishers the opportunity to get paid each time a visitor completes the simple survey.

The Atlantic Wire listed a few of the major publishers already onboard, including Pandora (News - Alert), New York Daily News, Texas Tribune, Lima News and AdWeek. The official Google Consumer Survey website also lists Lucky Brand, Timbuk2 and Reorient as a few of the early case studies having success with the program.

Google already has a paid content product intact called Google One Pass, although the difference is that Google Consumer Surveys isn’t selling subscriptions to survey takers, making it a more attractive offer to some publishers. Google states publishers earn an average of $15 per thousand survey responses, which can lead to quite a substantial revenue stream for a high-traffic site.

The pricing for businesses looking to conduct market research via Google Consumer Survey is just $.10 per survey response, with a minimum of $100 per study. Publishers are paid $.05 for each survey response delivered from its website. Businesses looking to include various demographics in their market research, such as gender or geographic region, will pay $.50 per survey response. Google recommends a minimum of 1,500 responses for accuracy.

The advantage Google Consumer Surveys offers over larger market research firms is primarily in cost. For as little as $.10 per survey response, businesses can conduct valuable market research for pennies on the dollar compared to bigger research companies.

Matt Cutts, software engineer at Google, talked about the new Google product at his Google+ page (+Matt Cutts). “When a visitor lands on a page with premium content, they can answer a question to get to the content – much friendlier than asking people to pay for content directly,” he summarized. “Publishers earn money and visitors get higher-quality content. Meanwhile, market research and polling get easier, faster and cheap enough that almost anyone can do it.”