As of today, we have spun off ethnio into a separate company! You can read all about it, appropriately, on the new ethnio blog. It’s been five years since we created ethnio, and it’s finally grown enough to leave the warm embrace of our consulting firm, and this will improve things for our customers and help with a whole slew of changes we’re working on.
Category: ethnio
A few weeks ago, for a study of digital readers in university settings, our client had neither a highly trafficked website nor a large recruiting budget. No problem, we said, we can use Ethnio via Twitter. Normally this method is a great supplement to placing Ethnio code on a website, but for a student audience we were confident we could recruit the whole sample that way. It actually worked. We picked people out of the middle of the internet based on words they used in their conversations or profiles on Twitter. Here’s how it went and what we learned:
I’m extremely excited to be nearing completion of the first big redesign of Ethnio in over three years, and want to send out a big thank you to everyone who has been using and talking about Ethnio lately for making this possible.
Still Months Away.
As part of the redesign, we’re introducing brand new monthly pricing. I’ll be alerting current customers and users over the next couple weeks, and the new pricing won’t go live for months, but I wanted to pass on our thoughts about the change and provide some details for anyone that’s interested, especially since folks like Geckoboard are explaining their pricing in such a great way. So these are the big Ethnio pricing changes:
- Monthly pricing instead of per-recruit pricing
- A starting plan at $49/month that is $351 cheaper than our previous cheapest plan of $400 for 200 recruits.
- Unlimited recruits for most plans
- “By traffic” pricing similar to Typekit
- A new free plan that offers 200 recruits for non-profits, good causes, and any small web sites
- Current paid customers get two months free
Since most people use Ethnio by placing our JavaScript code on their web site, our biggest single cost has been the infrastructure to keep up with that code living on hundreds of web sites. Even if the ethnio recruiting screeners are turned off, our server still gets a request every time someone loads a page on any of those sites containing Ethnio code. What that has meant over the last few years is that we are up to nearly 3.4 Million pageviews PER DAY for the Ethnio JavaScript.
That’s a lot.
It’s an especially large amount of traffic for a UX research and design firm of five people, with a team of one person who manages, designs, and supports Ethnio (I’ll give you a hint – that’s me). Over the past year as Ethnio has got onto more sites, we have optimized, cached, and gotten very clever with how that code is handled, but when a gigantic web site like Wikipedia or Levi’s uses Ethnio, or even hundreds of small ones, it costs us a ton. But there has been no way to correlate traffic with our ethnio pricing, because we had no way to differentiate between the downtime while our code has slowly been getting placed on many of the largest sites on the interwebs – Sony, Careerbuilders, Intuit, Mint, HP, Pogo, and on and on. Which is great. We love it. Thank you! People are doing better recruiting and starting to really use our little research recruiting web app that I started in 2004. But we needed some way to differentiate costs to our server from dormant Ethnio code. It turns out one handy thing about JavaScript is that it can very easily can track all this traffic on our customers’ web sites.
Size matters jokes are stupid.
So the new pricing works based on the size of your web site, not really how much you use Ethnio. The idea is that if you have a small web site, Ethnio will be close to free, but if you have a huge web site with lots of traffic, your cost for keeping ethnio code live on your pages will simply be more. Not crazy expensive by any means, but between $49 and $299 per month. You can cancel any of the monthly plans at any time and maintain access to your account and all data. If cost is a huge concern, you can even remove the Ethnio code and only place it live when you need it, or wrap it in a high traffic code to reduce impact to our servers. But at most of our customers’ organizations, adding and removing code is a difficult task with IT, and so we believe there is value in being able to leave the ethnio code lying around until you have a research study, and being able to instantly flip the big on/off switch inside Ethnio. You’ll also be able to send exactly the right kind of people to other tools like surveys with the new version of Ethnio, so you can begin using it as a live intercept wrapper for all your research needs. This screen shot below isn’t final yet, but this is roughly the new pricing:
The pageviews listed above mean that if you have up to 10,000 pageviews on your site or any page, then Ethnio is free. This has nothing to do with views of ethnio screeners – it’s simply pageviews of pages that contain the Ethnio code. If you have up to 25,000 page views than you should get the “Little” plan. If you have more than 500k pageviews per month, we’ll put you in an Enterprise plan. If you’re not sure exactly how many page views a particular page or set of pages you’d like to recruit from receive, you can always place the ethnio code and we’ll tell you from inside ethnio. That’s pretty much it. Would love to hear any questions or feedback in the comments, via twitter, or via email at info@ethnio.com.
We’re finally starting to charge money for Ethnio live recruiting. Lots more details in the full blog post, available right down here:
Categories
Ethnio and The Money Situation
Ethnio Will Cost Money on February 1st
It’s been four years since we started Ethnio as the world’s first remote user research tool, and it’s been awesome to get all of the support and usage from everyone. Thanks! This is a friendly heads up that we’ll start charging for Ethnio on February 1st., 2009. It’s an unsurprising combination of the financial apocalypse and usage increasing to millions of views, hundreds of thousands of recruits, and more server load than we can really handle for free. You might have a few questions about the details, which are covered below in neat little sections.
Pricing Details
Here are the three basic packages starting in February. By default, you’ll remain in the free package until you need to recruit more than 20 people for your research using ethnio. The site has not been updated so this email is just early warning for your convenience and planning.
| * 20 Recruits | Free |
| * 200 Recruits | $400 |
| * 2,000 Recruits | $800 |
Umm, What is a Recruit?
Anybody that answers all of your screener questions counts as one recruit. So essentially every response to an ethnio screener is a recruit, but we have some clever ways of only charging for people that are qualified research candidiates. The same kind you would pay a recruiting agency $100 a head for! The first way is that ethnio automatically marks any response with more than 3 blank fields as “bogus.” The second is that any recruits through your preview are not counted, so you can test away. The best is that you can manually mark any response as “bogus” so that it won’t count towards your monthly total. That is on the honor system, yo. We trust you to not mark all your recruits as bogus but our interns will check just in case. Login to ethnio, Go to the Recruits tab, and check out the Status column to try it out.
Can I Still Login for Free?
Yep. Your current ethnio login will continue to work until the end of time, so don’t worry about losing access to any recruits or screeners you have completed in the past. The new system will always let you login and create screeners, but will only let you receive 20 recruits for free per month. After that, it will ask you to upgrade. While you are using ethnio for free, we do ask that you take down the activation code if you are on a big ol’ web site (20,000+ uniques / day).
This is Way Too Expensive You Suck
Well that’s not really a question, but you can always purchase recruits for one study and not pay anything until you need another study. Like with flickr or vimeo but way more pricey and geared towards us qualitative researchers out there.
What the Crap is Ethnio?
There are two places you might want to check. The first is our outstanding blog on remote user testing, and the second is our upcoming book, “Remote Research,” with the fine folks at Rosenfeld Media. That’s all for now and feel free to reply back to this message or email us directly with questions. More information and site updates to come.
Categories
Ethnio gets shouted out
The fine folks at Conversion Rate Experts have just posted a blog entry about web tools that help you learn why users abandon your site, and both B|P and Ethnio get shout-outs:
Ideally you want to interview your visitors who aren’t customers yet. That’s where Ethnio comes to the rescue…
Ethnio provides an easy way of adding a pop-up survey to your website, which asks your visitors if they’d like to participate in a usability test. You can customize the survey, so you can ask them details about themselves, such as why they visited your site and whether this is their first visit.
This is all about the pragmatic side of remote research: naturally, getting to know your users is critical for understanding why they’re leaving your site. Using a tool like Ethnio helps ensure that the people you’re talking to actually represent your users. Need a refresher course on live recruiting? I got your Ethnio right here, hombre.
“Mediocre?” you may say, “But it works great and we love it…most of the time.” Well, as they say, there’s the rub. It can work, but it can also suck. Bugs abound, features break randomly or are absent altogether. Basically, Interweb gremlins feast on the fatty innards of the Ethnio beast. (Meaning: our system architecture is broken and we really, really want to re-build it.)
Ethnio started as a home-spun solution to help us run remote usability interviews. We patched it together from a collection of PHP scripts and a quick and dirty implementation of the VNC screen sharing protocol. Learning as we went along, we moved from developer to developer and the web application backend grew and grew, making bug fixes and additional features more and more treacherous.
So here we are, three years since Ethnio, the first remote moderated research app ever, became a reality. It’s just Nate and I working on maintaining, supporting, and developing the product – in addition to doing interesting research and the (wonderful) chaos of running a really keen research practice. Since we first started selling Ethnio, about a year ago, the time we’ve been able to spend fixing bugs and developing new features has diminished as we spend more and more time supporting existing customers and chatting with new ones. All the while we’ve been talking about new and exciting features, without the people power or people time to implement them – without the availability to even fix many of the existing bugs and quirks.
We don’t want Ethnio to be relegated to the status of a first-run product that faded, like WordStar or the Diamond Rio. We’re not satisfied with an okay product that mostly works. We are convinced we can make Ethnio an elegant, exceptional solution – and we’re dedicating the next 4 to 6 months to just that. Yes, it does mean that we’re going to stop selling Ethnio and giving trials in the meantime, but we promise it will be so much better for everyone in the long run.
We are still just as passionate about creating a technology that helps people understand people – we just don’t want our technology to get in the way of that ideal.
We’ll post updates on our progress along the way. Watch this space.
We’re doing everything we can do to free up more trial spots for everyone who’s been requesting them. We’d rather your first experience with ethnio was successful then have you see a bunch of bugs, so bear with us as we work out the scalability of our tool. One surefire way to get your name to the top of the list is to email us your experience and desires for remote testing.
We’ve stopped issuing new Ethnio accounts for the next six months while we make the product amazing instead of promising but buggy. We’ve had an amazing amount of interest, and three million people have viewed Ethnio live recruiting screeners, but we’re not content with selling a product that’s mediocre. We want more. Mike and Nate want to build the best moderated research web app ever. So we’re taking time to fix bugs and incorporate new functionality. This army of two people has been focusing on support, sales, and maintenance instead of our ideals, and so we’re taking this break to give you a new Ethnio. Read the bloggy blog for updates on our progress, and as always, we’d love to hear from you.