NEWS28 September 2010

E-Rewards buys Peanut Labs and merges it with Research Now

M&A North America

US— Online fieldwork agency E-Rewards has bought social media sample supplier Peanut Labs, a $5m venture capital-backed business.

Peanut Labs, based in San Francisco, recruits social network and gaming network users to take part in surveys in exchange for virtual currency that can be spent within those networks.

Partners include Facebook, Zynga and MySpace, and Peanut Labs boasts a respondent pool of more than 240m consumers.

E-Rewards plans to integrate Peanut Labs’ survey business with Research Now, the UK-based online panel company it acquired last year in an £85m deal. From next year Peanut Labs will cease to be a client-facing brand, and will trade under the Research Now banner, which also became the global trading name for E-Rewards Market Research earlier this week.

Peanut Labs’ monetisation platform, which is targeted at social network owners and games publishers, will retain its existing identity.

In a statement, the company said its acquisition by E-Rewards and its subsequent merger with Research Now increases the amount of survey inventory available to its publishing partners more than tenfold. “Peanut Labs now has sufficient survey inventory to monetise all of our partners’ titles,” said co-founder Ali Moiz.

As well as surveys, Peanut Labs also provides cost-per-action (CPA) offers as a monetisation option – though it cites data suggesting social network and gaming network users prefer surveys over CPA offers by a margin of 2:1.

With the E-Rewards/Research Now deal, Moiz says the company will no longer look to make money on CPA offer transactions. It will continue to provide them if clients request them, Moiz said, but all revenue will be passed on to publishing partners.

Research Now CEO Chris Havemann said: “As researchers are increasingly looking to incorporate social media into their sampling methodologies, Peanut Labs will serve as a strong fit to accelerate our social media strategy while enhancing the global capabilities we offer to researchers.”

@RESEARCH LIVE

1 Comment

14 years ago

A tremendous success story for RN over the last 8 years. This is how growth in an increasingly MR-Digital Media landscape should be managed and achieved. Accepting the e-Rewards acquisition was a wise decision part of the overall growth startegy that also included the preservation of the value in the RN brand. Well done to them for undertsanding that they should develop the brand - not the category ...

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