If it took less time to get from your car to your favorite store in the mall on your last visit, you might have cloud computing to thank.  The crews of surveyors asking for a “few minutes of your time” to answer a some questions  that were once a fixture in shopping malls have almost disappeared. Why? Online polls are cheaper.

ESOMAR and KPMG estimate businesses spend $30 billion per year on market research, but cloud computing has begun to dramatically impacting the space.  Face-to-face surveys are disappearing. Focus groups  are becoming less common. Studies require less time and dollars. The size and diversity of participant pools is growing.

Amazon’s micro-tasking site Mechanical Turk, or mTurk as the cool kids say, is one of the most visible players in the space. The site eliminates the need to print and distribute physical surveys and input the data. With Mechanical Turk, researchers can poll and collect responses from hundreds of willing subjects for a small fraction of the time and cost required by traditional approaches. Amazon isn’t the only vendor capitalizing on the ravenous appetite for market data. Chaordix provides a  cloud-based, enterprise focused crowd sourcing platform that allows organizations to create their own mTurk style communities.

Although this is good news for companies, this is bad news for everyone hoping to make a decent amount of cash for their time. Tasks on sites like mTurks can pay as little as 2 cents for responses that take a couple of minutes to $20 for hours of your time. Enterprise specific communities may not pay cash at all, many elect to leverage game mechanics such as badges to encourage participation.

The impact of cloud computing extends beyond technology teams. It makes entirely new business models possible and challenges others, like market research. Our new weekly series, Cloud Disruption, will examine how cloud computing in its many incarnations is reshaping business – and in some cases, our lives.