Through our Ciao comparison shopping portals we gather unique and valuable user-generated content in the form of product and merchant reviews. Visitors to our Ciao portals use these reviews to help make purchasing decisions and we derive revenue from this Internet traffic via e-commerce, merchant referrals, click-throughs, and advertising sales. Through our Greenfield Online and Ciao Surveys websites and affiliate networks, we collect, organize and sell consumer opinions in the form of survey responses to marketing research companies and companies worldwide.
The company was acquired by Microsoft for $486 million in October 2008. The next year, ToLuna, a global online research panel and survey technology provider, snatched up Greenfield Online for the significantly smaller sum of $40 million.