When newspapers first started publishing to the web, the content was free. Back then, the web was a secondary source, a supplement to newspaper that landed on your doorstep (or in your gutter) every day. As digital content grew more popular and newspaper subscriptions rates started their descent, publishers struggled to find ways to replace the income from paid subscriptions and display advertising. For a lot of publications, the paywall was the answer.

But as important as money is—and believe me, I’m not understating its importance—there are other kinds of value to be extracted from people who want to consume your content. ADWEEK is taking a crack at finding that value in addition to earning some scratch, via Google Consumer Surveys, unveiled by Google in March.

I read articles from ADWEEK frequently; they show up in various curated collections I follow. Today was the first day I saw this:

Google Consumer Surveys are “designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content,” according to a Google spokesrep quoted in an All Things D story.

The ADWEEK content remains free, but to see it you have to choose between responding to a short poll or share the article by tweeting it, liking it on Facebook or giving it a Google+ +1. Some market researcher is paying for the poll, so completing it generates a small fee for both Google and ADWEEK. (I suppose ADWEEK could add its own polls, too, gleaning insights into its readers or identifying trends.) The surveys start at 10 cents per response, which Google claims is one-tenth the cost of comparable research tools.

The sharing option expands the reach of the publication to people who might not currently read it, some of whom may become paying subscribers, advertisers or otherwise engage in some useful way.

Below the poll, you can see where the text for the rest of the article appears, but it’s greyed out until you vote or share, after which the invitation vanishes and the remainder of the article materializes.

So far, I’ve only seen this when following a link from one of the curated collections to an ADWEEK article. Finding it from the publication’s home page or through Google hasn’t produced the same results. I don’t know if that’s just my experience or if it’s intentional, or if the surveys are inserted randomly into articles.

While some are mildly critical of the approach, it doesn’t bother me at all. If I think my followers on Twitter or my Facebook friends would like the story, odds are I’d share it anyway, so the sharing option can actually save me a step. And I don’t mind sharing some information in a poll. It beats other monetization methods, including distracting video advertisements and restrictive paywalls.

I wonder what the next creative approach to generating revenue from web content with the minimum amount of friction will be.