YouGov's Chairman since April 2007 is Roger Parry, replacing political commentator Peter Kellner who now serves as President of the company. When YouGov floated for £18million in April 2005, Kellner owned 6% of the company.

Methodology

YouGov's methodology is to obtain responses from an invited group of Internet users, and then to filter these responses in line with demographic information. It draws these demographically-representative samples from a panel of about 250,000 people in the UK.Fact: date=September 2008

As YouGov's online methods use no field-force, giving it costs are lower some face-to-face or telephone methods. YouGov media clients include the The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Economist and Sky News.

Panel members, volunteer members of the public, are credited with 50p for each simple survey they complete (up to £ 2 for more time consuming ones). They are sent a cheque when the amount accrued reaches £50. Also, surveys are offered to individual participants infrequently (typically two to four per month). In addition there is a monthly prize survey, the completion of which enters the member into a prize draw, and other occasional prize surveys.yougov facebook publisher unknown

Accuracy

YouGov has contended that its opinion polls in recent UK elections, e.g. the 2001 general election, have been consistently more accurate than traditional opinion pollsters who repeatedly over-estimated the Labour vote.Fact: date=September 2008

This pattern was repeated during the 2005 general election campaign, when most traditional polls reported Labour's support in the range from 38 to 41%, compared with the 36% it achieved on polling day. In contrast, YouGov's nine polls during the final three weeks of the campaign all showed Labour on 36 or 37%, although NOP (published in The Independent) gave the most accurate forecast in their final poll in 2005.

Critics argueWho: date=September 2008 that, as not all of the public have access to the Internet, its samples cannot accurately reflect the views of the population as a whole.Livingstone criticises YouGov|date=2008-04-07 YouGov counters that they have a representative panel and they are able to weight their polls/surveys appropriately to reflect the national audience that they are aiming to poll.

It is a function of their internet panel approach that YouGov isn't able to pick up turnout factors to the same degree as other pollsters and they exclude it from their methods. However, traditional polls use widely differing methods to take account of turnout, and these produce equally varied corrections to the raw data. No consensus has emerged as to what, if any, correction has greatest validity.Fact: date=September 2008