Poll Position: Gallup Streams Daily Briefings

In order to develop the Daily Briefing, Gallup began looking for a streaming provider in the spring of 2004 and eventually decided to work with Akamai. "We looked around for quite a bit," says Clifton, "we didn’t just marry the first company." Akamai now helps Gallup stream the Daily Briefings to approximately 3,000 viewers every day.

The free Daily Briefing is part of a larger initiative on the part of Gallup to move to a paid-content model, while continuing to offer some important content for free. The Gallup site officially shifted to a paid-content model the same day that the Daily Briefings launched. At that time, the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefings became the Gallup Poll On Demand, and the $95/year subscription service offered new features, election coverage, and Topics & Trends in addition to more traditional coverage.

The Gallup Poll Daily Briefing currently focuses on political information, because that is the daily conversation at least until November 2, but political topics often lend themselves to other subjects. For example, when Cheney's lesbian daughter was brought up in one of the debates, it sparked a great deal of discussion around the country about same-sex marriage and gay rights in general.

After the election, business will continue as usual for Gallup, and the Daily Briefings will continue to highlight whatever the day’s hot topic is. Gallup and other news organizations are beginning to look at the possible outcomes of the holiday season for retailers, for example. Will the season go the way of Wal-Marts, that continue to lower prices, or high-end retailers that are banking on a continued bounce-back of the economy and are raising prices in anticipation? Gallup also plans to sort through White House news, business information, and other timely topics, and continue to release survey results that fuel discussion and debate.

Gallup also is exploring possible adjustments to the Daily Briefing, such as the possibility of sending emails to interested parties that include the day’s topics and provide a link directly to the streamed Daily Briefing. Meanwhile, Gallup's three-stack product may give them the hat trick they were looking for. As Clifton says, "we've never been as ubiquitous as we are now."