Making use of years’ worth of data from previous surveys is helping online polling firm YouGov to boost profits, in addition to the new polls corporate clients are commissioning.
Chief executive Stephan Shakespeare, announcing a 13% rise in adjusted pre-tax profit for the year to July, explained: “We have people taking our surveys continuously and we build up all this information. We have surveys going back five years and they build up value.
“If you want to know, for example, what are the audience likes for Downton Abbey, we can look at how many children they have, what supermarkets they like, and so on.”
YouGov has a panel of over 440,000 people in Britain and 2.8 million worldwide.
Revenues climbed 8% to £62.6 million, with the UK up strongly thanks to clients such as Barclays, BlackRock, ITV and Costa Coffee, eager to know what customers are thinking. Around 100,000 UK panellists have let YouGov access their social media profiles on Facebook and Twitter, helping the firm get further insights in real time.
The dividend rises 20% to 0.6p. Shakespeare, who owns around a tenth of YouGov, and wife Rosamund are in line for a further windfall of up to £744,000 as YouGov is buying their stake in Doughty Media 2, the company behind Opigram, which collects information on people’s personal tastes.
