Since 2014 we help people make up their minds. Our technology enables people to express their opinion across the open web. We distribute contextually appropriate polls into our international and national premium publisher network, giving millions of people the opportunity to share their voice every day.
We work closely with our premium publisher (Spiegel, FAZ, T-Online, Times…) network and selected brands (from industries of insurances, Fitness, Food, Pharmaceutical…). With our polls, we reach up to 80 million users per month and increase ad efficiency by 25% as well as loyalty rates for publishers through our ability to address users with relevant and meaningful questions.
Q: Tell us about yourself?
The siblings Cornelius and Pia Frey founded Opinary together. What started as a hobby quickly became a rapidly growing business. Pia has a background in journalism and Cornelius previously worked at McKinsey & Co.
Q: What is the inspiration behind your business?
At Opinary, we think that democracies thrive on well informed people and diverse opinions. Therefore we want to represent debates and stimulate open discussions in the open web.
The internet as it is today reinforces filter bubbles and polarization.
Opinary has created a technology that gamifies discussions, while preventing disrespectful behaviours we know from comment sections and other forums on the internet. Giving people low barrier access to other people’s sentiment aims to provide balance in heated debates.
Q: What is your magic sauce?
There is no magic sauce, but our mission as well as our broad publisher network enabled us to build a brand-safe network for a better kind of advertising. Users know and trust our tools across premium publishers and share their view on any given question. This has given us a chance to let our advertiser clients benefit from razor sharp targeting that we can provide based on cookie-free campaign and 100% privacy friendly distribution.
Q: Where do you see your company going in 5 years?
5 years in real life are about 20 years for a startup – so that’s hard to tell. But we aim to further internationalize our business and increase our impact on users by providing even deeper insights, on publishers by bringing them even closer to their audiences and on brands by letting them thrive on user-friendly and cookie-free advertising.
Q: What has been your biggest setback so far?
The past 18 months heavily impacted our international expansion.
Q: What is the next big challenge for your business?
Overall, the biggest challenge for a startup is to keep focus, much more than having a bright vision. Currently we’re focusing on scalability of our format which includes a lot of technical migration. Beyond that, our data team is partnering with the Technical University in Berlin to sharpen our formula of what makes a good question, which also contributes to our overall goal of scalability.
Q: How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We have built a great tool for publishers to get into low-barrier conversations with their audiences and increase loyalty of their communities. For brands, we have found a fantastic tool to find and address their audiences in meaningful ways and in a cookie-free fashion.
And readers embrace Opinary so much because they can vote and directly track how they relate to other people in their community. And the great thing is that this is one and the same tool, which has such diverse benefits for these three parties.
All interested brands and publishers can contact us at [email protected] with their inquiries, or visit our website opinary.com to view case studies from a variety of industries. And everyone who’s interested in working with us should check out our careers page.
