{"site":{"name":"Koji","description":"AI-native customer research platform that helps teams conduct, analyze, and synthesize customer interviews at scale.","url":"https://www.koji.so","contentTypes":["blog","documentation"],"lastUpdated":"2026-08-10T21:40:22.799Z"},"content":[{"type":"blog","id":"981ccf86-2cf4-4725-ba82-6bca5277caae","slug":"koji-vs-yougov-2026","title":"Koji vs YouGov (2026): Standing Panel Data vs AI-Moderated Customer Interviews","url":"https://www.koji.so/blog/koji-vs-yougov-2026","summary":"YouGov reported FY2025 revenue of 388.9 million pounds, up 16 percent reported but 1 percent underlying, with Data Products at a 31 percent adjusted operating margin against 11 percent for custom Research, and a panel of 32.4 million registered panellists across 63 markets. A standing panel is a fixed asset, so its natural product is subscription data whose questions were finalised before a buyer arrived, which makes it excellent for comparable measurement and incapable of diagnosis. Koji runs AI-moderated voice and text interviews with a company own customers, combining six structured question types with automatic thematic analysis, and is the complementary instrument for explaining why a tracked metric moved.","content":"YouGov is a panel company that sells continuously collected data. Koji is an AI-native research platform that runs moderated interviews with your own customers and returns coded themes the same day. The difference is not speed or price. It is whether the question was decided before you arrived.\n\n**Short answer:** choose YouGov when you need nationally representative measurement, brand tracking against a category norm, or public-opinion data across many markets with a methodology that will survive outside scrutiny. Choose Koji when the people who hold your answer are your own customers, prospects and churned accounts, and when the question is why rather than how many. Most serious insights functions run both.\n\n## What YouGov reported for FY2025\n\nYouGov is listed in London, so its numbers are published rather than estimated. For the year ended 31 July 2025:\n\n- **Group revenue of 388.9 million pounds**, up 16 percent as reported but only **1 percent on an underlying basis**, with most of the reported growth coming from the full-year contribution of the acquired CPS business, rebranded YouGov Shopper.\n- **Adjusted operating profit of 60.7 million pounds**, up 22 percent, at a **16 percent margin** against 15 percent the prior year.\n- **Data Products: revenue of 83.9 million pounds**, flat as reported and up 1 percent underlying, with adjusted operating profit of **25.8 million pounds at a 31 percent margin**.\n- **Research: revenue of 176.9 million pounds**, flat as reported and up 1 percent underlying, with adjusted operating profit of **19.5 million pounds at an 11 percent margin**.\n- **Shopper: revenue of 128.1 million pounds**, with adjusted operating profit of 27.2 million pounds at a 21 percent margin.\n- **32.4 million registered panellists**, up 12 percent from roughly 29 million, across **63 markets**.\n- Stephan Shakespeare returned to the chief executive role in February 2025.\n\nThat is a well-run business with a genuinely rare asset. It is also a margin map, and margin maps are the most honest document any supplier produces.\n\n## The margin map tells you which product you will be offered\n\nLook at the two research-side divisions side by side.\n\n| Division | FY2025 revenue | Adjusted operating margin | What you are buying |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| Data Products | 83.9m pounds | **31 percent** | Access to data already collected from the panel |\n| Research | 176.9m pounds | **11 percent** | A custom study designed around your question |\n| Shopper | 128.1m pounds | 21 percent | Purchase behaviour data from the shopper panel |\n\n**Selling you data that already exists is roughly three times as profitable as going out and asking your question.** That is not a criticism of anyone's sales practice. It is arithmetic, and it follows directly from the delivery model: a subscription product is written once and sold many times, while a custom study consumes researcher hours in fixed proportion to its size. We made the general version of this argument with published figures in [Koji vs Ipsos](/blog/koji-vs-ipsos-2026), where the same coupling shows up as a 12 percent operating margin.\n\nWhat matters for you is the gradient it creates. When you bring a question to any panel-first supplier, the commercial gradient runs toward \"here is what we already measure that is close to what you asked\" and away from \"let us design a study around what you actually need to know.\" Often the nearest existing measurement is genuinely the right answer, delivered faster and cheaper than a custom study could manage. The risk is the case where **the closest available proxy quietly becomes the answer**, and nobody in the room notices the substitution because the data is real, the sample is large and the chart is excellent.\n\n## A panel is a fixed asset, and fixed assets shape products\n\nMaintaining 32.4 million registered panellists across 63 markets costs money continuously, whether or not anyone commissions a study this week. The rational product on top of that asset is a subscription to data collected on a standing schedule: brand and reputation tracking, audience profiling, syndicated attitudinal measurement.\n\nThis produces a specific and underappreciated property. A survey commits every question before the first answer arrives, which is the classic limitation covered in our [surveys versus interviews](/docs/survey-vs-interview) guide. **Standing panel data goes one step further: the questions were finalised before you had your problem.**\n\nThat is exactly what you want when the job is comparability over time. A tracker is only useful because the wording never changes; the moment you improve a question you break the series. It is exactly what you do not want when the job is diagnosis. Tracking will tell you, credibly and in 63 markets, that consideration among 25 to 34 year olds fell four points this quarter. It cannot tell you which of six plausible causes is real, because nobody was there to ask a follow-up.\n\n## Scale is a representativeness asset, not a relevance asset\n\n32.4 million panellists buys something real: the ability to fill a nationally representative quota, in many countries, quickly, with weighting that a regulator or a journalist will accept.\n\nIt does not buy relevance to your specific commercial question, and the gap is widest exactly where the money is:\n\n- **Your churned accounts are not in the panel.** Neither are your trial users who never activated, or the buyer who evaluated you and signed with a competitor last month.\n- **In B2B the incidence problem is decisive.** If your buyer is a procurement lead at a mid-market logistics firm, the share of a general consumer panel that qualifies rounds to nothing, and screening cost rises accordingly. The mechanics of why low incidence makes sample expensive are covered in our breakdown of [survey sample cost, CPI and incidence rate](/blog/survey-sample-cost-cpi-incidence-rate-2026).\n- **Panel populations are self-selected and repeatedly surveyed.** That is a manageable, well-documented condition rather than a scandal, and the effects are explored in [professional respondents and panel conditioning](/blog/professional-respondents-panel-conditioning-2026) and in our guide to [sampling bias](/docs/sampling-bias-research).\n\nThe honest summary: a panel is the right instrument when you want to know what a *population* thinks, and the wrong one when you want to know what *your customers* think.\n\n## What Koji does instead\n\nYou write a brief. Koji drafts an interview guide. An AI moderator conducts the interviews itself, by voice or by text, in the participant's own language, and probes when someone says something the guide did not anticipate.\n\n- **AI-moderated voice and text interviews** running in parallel, at any hour, with no scheduling. Twenty conversations can happen simultaneously at nine in the evening.\n- **Six structured question types** inside one study: `open_ended`, `scale`, `single_choice`, `multiple_choice`, `ranking` and `yes_no`. This is the part that matters against a tracker: a single Koji study returns a satisfaction distribution *and* the reasons behind every score, from the same conversation. The [structured questions guide](/docs/structured-questions-guide) covers how the quantitative and qualitative halves aggregate together.\n- **Automatic thematic analysis** with descriptive and in-vivo codes grounded in participants' own words, then clustered into one canonical codebook across the whole study, as described in the [thematic analysis guide](/docs/thematic-analysis-guide).\n- **One-click reports** where every theme traces back to the transcript line that produced it.\n- **No moderator bias and no moderator fatigue.** Interview 40 is conducted exactly like interview 1, which is what makes comparison across accounts clean.\n- **Customizable AI consultants** that carry your context between studies, so the second study starts where the first finished. Our [research repository guide](/docs/research-repository-guide) covers why that compounding matters more than any single report.\n\n## Which one for which job\n\n| The job to be done | Better fit | Why |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| Nationally representative opinion measurement | YouGov | Panel scale, weighting, published methodology, external credibility |\n| Brand tracking with comparable history | YouGov | A tracker is valuable because the wording never changes |\n| Public-opinion and political polling | YouGov | Specialist practice with a long public record |\n| Category norms across many markets | YouGov | 63 markets and years of accumulated series |\n| Diagnosing why a tracked metric moved | Koji | Follow-up questions are the whole instrument |\n| Understanding why customers churned | Koji | Your own list, not a panel; results in days |\n| Win-loss and evaluation interviews | Koji | Your CRM contacts, no scheduling, no recruitment premium |\n| Message and positioning testing before launch | Koji | Cheap enough to iterate several rounds instead of buying one verdict |\n| Continuous discovery for a product team | Koji | Per-conversation pricing makes weekly research economically sane |\n\nThe two are complements far more often than substitutes. The pattern that works: use tracking to find out *that* something moved, and interviews to find out *why*. Buying only the first leaves you with a very well measured mystery. This is the same division of labour we describe for [analyst reports](/blog/analyst-reports-vs-customer-research-2026) and for [software review sites](/blog/software-review-sites-b2b-buyers-2026): secondary sources define the shape of a market, and primary work explains your position in it.\n\n## What each costs\n\nYouGov does not publish a rate card. Data Products are sold as subscriptions priced by market coverage, category and seat count; custom Research is quoted per project. Its disclosed 83.9 million pounds of Data Products revenue is a subscription base, which tells you the commercial shape without telling you your number.\n\nKoji publishes everything:\n\n- **Insights: 29 euro per month**, including 29 credits.\n- **Interviews: 79 euro per month**, including 79 credits.\n- **Annual plans at 290 and 790 euro**, which is two months free.\n- **Credits: a text interview costs 1, a voice interview 3, a report refresh 5.** Extra credits are 1 euro each, with packs at 50 for 50 euro, 100 for 95 euro and 250 for 225 euro.\n- **A quality gate:** only conversations scoring 3 or above consume a credit. A junk interview is free.\n- **10 free credits on signup**, no card required.\n\nForty voice interviews with your own customers is 120 credits. The point is not that it undercuts a panel subscription, which is a different product. The point is that it is cheap enough to be **iterative**: run a study, read it, realise you asked the wrong question, and run the better one tomorrow. That loop is where understanding actually comes from, and it is the thing a fixed-question instrument cannot offer at any price.\n\n## How to decide\n\nAsk one question: **is the person who holds my answer in a panel, or on my customer list?**\n\nIf your answer lives in a population, buy the population. YouGov is very good at populations and no platform is going to change that.\n\nIf your answer lives with people who have an invoice, a renewal date, a support history or a competitor's contract in their hands, then no panel contains them, and the study you need is a conversation. Do it yourself, in days, with the people who actually pay you. Start with the practical framing in our [customer validation guide](/docs/customer-validation-guide) or the [jobs-to-be-done interview method](/docs/jobs-to-be-done-interviews).\n\n**Related reading:** for the suppliers behind standing panel and retail data, see [NielsenIQ vs Circana vs Numerator](/blog/nielseniq-vs-circana-vs-numerator-2026), and for the buy-versus-ask decision itself, [syndicated data vs custom research](/blog/syndicated-data-vs-custom-research-2026).\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Is Koji an alternative to YouGov?\n\nFor part of the portfolio, yes. Koji replaces the custom qualitative work that sits alongside tracking: churn diagnosis, win-loss, message testing, concept feedback, pricing objections and discovery with your own customers. It does not replace nationally representative measurement, political polling, or brand trackers with years of comparable history, all of which depend on panel infrastructure and consistent wording that a conversational instrument does not provide. Most teams that adopt Koji keep a panel relationship for the measurement half.\n\n### What did YouGov report for FY2025?\n\nFor the year ended 31 July 2025, YouGov reported group revenue of 388.9 million pounds, up 16 percent as reported but only 1 percent underlying, with adjusted operating profit of 60.7 million pounds at a 16 percent margin. Data Products revenue was 83.9 million pounds at a 31 percent margin, Research was 176.9 million pounds at an 11 percent margin, and Shopper was 128.1 million pounds at a 21 percent margin. The panel reached 32.4 million registered panellists, up 12 percent, across 63 markets.\n\n### Why does the margin difference between divisions matter to a buyer?\n\nBecause it tells you the commercial gradient inside the supplier. Data Products earn roughly 31 percent while custom Research earns roughly 11 percent, which means selling access to already-collected data is materially more profitable than designing a study around your question. Often the existing measurement genuinely is the best answer, faster and cheaper than a custom study. The risk is the case where the nearest available proxy quietly substitutes for the question you actually asked, and the quality of the data makes the substitution hard to notice.\n\n### Can a panel answer why a tracked metric moved?\n\nNot directly. A tracker is valuable precisely because its wording is fixed, which is what makes quarters comparable, and that same property means no follow-up question was ever asked. You can cut the existing data by segment and generate hypotheses, but distinguishing between several plausible causes requires new fieldwork with the ability to probe. That is a qualitative job, and running it in days rather than weeks is the difference between a diagnosis that reaches the decision and one that arrives after it.\n\n### Does Koji work for B2B audiences?\n\nYes, and the advantage is largest there. B2B respondents are hard to schedule and expensive to recruit from panels because incidence is low, which is what drives cost per interview up. Koji interviews your own contacts, so recruitment is outreach rather than screening, and an AI moderator that runs at nine in the evening removes the single biggest barrier to senior participation. The consistency also helps: every account gets the same core questions, so comparison across them is clean.\n\n### How does analysis compare with a research supplier's team?\n\nEvery open-ended answer is coded during the study with descriptive and in-vivo labels grounded in the participant's own words, then near-duplicate codes are clustered into one canonical codebook across all interviews, while structured questions aggregate into charts in parallel. The output is a report where each theme links back to the transcript that produced it, so a skeptical stakeholder can verify any claim in seconds instead of trusting a summary slide. The practical difference is timing: the analysis is largely complete when fielding closes rather than several weeks later.\n\n## Answer the questions your tracker cannot\n\nA tracker tells you the number moved. It will never tell you why, because the follow-up question was not in the questionnaire and there was nobody there to ask it.\n\n**Start free with 10 credits.** Write a brief, launch a study with your own customers, and read coded themes today. No card, no scoping call, no subscription negotiation.","category":"Comparisons","lastModified":"2026-08-10T03:25:26.150273+00:00","metaTitle":"Koji vs YouGov (2026): Standing Panel Data vs AI-Moderated Interviews","metaDescription":"YouGov runs 32.4 million panellists across 63 markets, and its FY2025 accounts show Data Products at a 31 percent margin against 11 percent for custom Research. What a standing panel is best at, and what it cannot diagnose.","keywords":["koji vs yougov","yougov alternative","yougov brandindex","yougov pricing","panel data vs interviews","brand tracking alternative","yougov profiles"],"aiSummary":"YouGov reported FY2025 revenue of 388.9 million pounds, up 16 percent reported but 1 percent underlying, with Data Products at a 31 percent adjusted operating margin against 11 percent for custom Research, and a panel of 32.4 million registered panellists across 63 markets. A standing panel is a fixed asset, so its natural product is subscription data whose questions were finalised before a buyer arrived, which makes it excellent for comparable measurement and incapable of diagnosis. Koji runs AI-moderated voice and text interviews with a company own customers, combining six structured question types with automatic thematic analysis, and is the complementary instrument for explaining why a tracked metric moved.","aiKeywords":["yougov","panel data","brand tracking","ai moderated interviews","customer research","market research panels"],"aiContentType":"guide","faqItems":[{"answer":"For part of the portfolio. Koji replaces custom qualitative work such as churn diagnosis, win-loss, message testing and discovery with your own customers. It does not replace nationally representative measurement, political polling or brand trackers with years of comparable history, which depend on panel infrastructure and fixed wording.","question":"Is Koji an alternative to YouGov?"},{"answer":"For the year ended 31 July 2025, revenue of 388.9 million pounds, up 16 percent reported and 1 percent underlying, with adjusted operating profit of 60.7 million pounds at a 16 percent margin. Data Products was 83.9 million pounds at a 31 percent margin, Research 176.9 million pounds at 11 percent, Shopper 128.1 million pounds at 21 percent, with 32.4 million panellists across 63 markets.","question":"What did YouGov report for FY2025?"},{"answer":"It shows the commercial gradient inside the supplier. Selling access to already-collected data earns roughly 31 percent while designing a custom study earns roughly 11 percent. Often the existing measurement is genuinely the right answer, but the risk is that the nearest available proxy quietly substitutes for the question you actually asked.","question":"Why does the margin difference between divisions matter to a buyer?"},{"answer":"Not directly. A tracker is valuable because its wording is fixed, which is exactly why no follow-up question was ever asked. Segmenting existing data generates hypotheses, but distinguishing between plausible causes requires new fieldwork with the ability to probe.","question":"Can a panel answer why a tracked metric moved?"},{"answer":"Yes, and the advantage is largest there. B2B respondents are expensive to recruit from panels because incidence is low. Koji interviews your own contacts, so recruitment is outreach rather than screening, and an AI moderator running at any hour removes the biggest barrier to senior participation.","question":"Does Koji work for B2B audiences?"},{"answer":"Open-ended answers are coded during the study with descriptive and in-vivo labels grounded in participants' own words, then clustered into one canonical codebook, while structured questions aggregate into charts in parallel. Every theme links back to the transcript that produced it, and analysis is largely complete when fielding closes.","question":"How does analysis compare with a research supplier's team?"}],"relatedTopics":["yougov","panel data","brand tracking","market research firms","ai interviews"]}],"pagination":{"total":1,"returned":1,"offset":0}}