The first problem was getting people to come back. Prodege had tried charitable search engines. It had tried celebrity search sites with sweepstakes. The names could bring visitors through the door. The prize draw gave many of them little reason to stay. Then the company changed what a visit was worth: points that accumulated toward something a person could actually redeem.
- Consumers earn rewards through brands including Swagbucks, MyPoints and InboxDollars.
- Businesses buy research, customer acquisition and access to those audiences.
- The advantage is the ongoing relationship with participants, before a survey even begins.
The point that changed the business
Prodege’s beginnings were unusually well suited to a fundraising experiment. Josef Gorowitz had studied to become a rabbi; Scott Dudelson was a concert photographer with music-industry relationships. The company began in 2005 with an idea for charitable search. Let supporters search online, share the resulting revenue with their organizations, and turn an ordinary habit into a contribution.
Distribution proved stubborn. In his Mixergy interview, Dudelson described charity partners delivering too few users to make the model profitable. Celebrity partnerships offered bigger audiences. But sweepstakes introduced a second difficulty: most people walked away without a prize. Redeemable points offered visible progress. Swagbucks.com launched in February 2008, making the reward itself the destination.
“We couldn’t give out enough points to our users to really encourage them to come back every day.”
Scott Dudelson, co-founder, speaking to Mixergy
Even that required adjustment. Search generated limited revenue, which constrained the rewards available. Surveys and special offers opened additional ways to fund participation. The useful lesson is specific: an incentive needs both a reason for the consumer to care and a revenue source that can support it.
A gift card has two customers
Look at Prodege from the consumer’s side and it resembles a collection of small opportunities: answer questions, shop, play a game, earn a reward. Look from a brand’s side and those same activities become research participation, a purchase or a new customer. Prodege operates between the two, connecting a business budget to an action someone is willing to take.
Today, that arrangement supports three businesses. Insights handles research, from audience recruitment to analysis. Performance helps advertisers acquire users and drive engagement. The Partner Network lets publishers integrate surveys and offers through APIs and software development kits. A publisher can earn revenue from participation; an advertiser can pay for a desired outcome; a researcher can commission answers.
The distinction from a standalone survey builder is consequential. Prodege owns consumer destinations that people visit for reasons beyond a particular questionnaire. Its September 2026 leadership announcement described relationships with more than 125 million people across its communities. That figure describes the wider network, rather than the number available for any individual study.
The expensive part is finding the right human
Pollfish, acquired in 2022, gives customers a self-service way into research. Its published DIY price starts at $0.95 per response. Full-service projects start at $5,000, while enterprise packages start at a $10,000 annual commitment. Those are starting points: longer questionnaires, specialist audiences and additional methods affect the bill. A cheap answer to the wrong question remains an expense.
Pollfish’s published entry rate. Targeting and study complexity change the final cost.
The toolkit serves familiar decisions: which concept deserves development, whether packaging communicates the intended message, or how consumers respond to a price. Prodege also offers targeting informed by receipts and digital behavior. For a shopper study, evidence of buying a category can be more useful than a broad demographic description.
Customers include research buyers, agencies, marketers and app developers. Public examples make the work less abstract. Prodege and Procter & Gamble presented research on AI-assisted participant recruitment at TMRE in 2024. A separate Panera Bread session examined product launches through price, product, promotion and placement. These are buying decisions with consequences beyond a dashboard.
Prodege consequently competes across several shopping lists: audience suppliers, research agencies, survey platforms and performance marketing networks. Its argument is that those services become more useful when connected to consumer communities it operates. Buyers still need to judge the particular service, audience and methodology they are purchasing.
For a small team, the practical route is a defined study: choose the audience, draft the questions, inspect the estimated cost and decide whether outside research help is warranted. A larger brand can commission design, fieldwork and reporting together. The software and service options address different shortages: one team needs respondents; another needs someone who knows what to ask them.
The next question belongs to AI
In May 2025, Prodege integrated Conversational AI into Pollfish. The feature conducts conversations with human respondents and produces summaries. The attraction is understandable: a conventional questionnaire can record that someone dislikes a product; a follow-up can explore the reason. Automating parts of that exchange could make qualitative work practical for more projects.
Speed does not remove the sampling problem. An opt-in rewards community is not automatically a representative population. Rare audiences may remain difficult to recruit, and a leading question remains leading when an AI asks it. A sensible buyer starts with the decision, checks who must be heard, then chooses the tool.
Give people a reason to come back
Expansion has involved substantial capital. TCV invested $60 million in 2014. Great Hill Partners announced an investment in 2021 to support growth and acquisitions, without disclosing terms. Partnerships extend distribution too: AirAsia rewards members can earn points through Prodege games, surveys and advertiser offers.
Todd Parsons, formerly a Criteo product and performance-media executive, became CEO on October 1, 2026. He inherits a business whose basic bargain is older than its AI tools. For anyone building a community, the transferable idea is to make participation visibly worthwhile and fund that value sustainably. The point matters because the next visit is always optional.