You thought time had moved on and the inanities of the dotcom days were all in the past? You thought wrong. Not only are consumer internet companies once again being valued on the number of eyeballs they can attract: there still isn’t any agreement on how to count those eyeballs in first place.
In the age of Google and pay-per-click advertising, this might come as a surprise. After all, the Web is meant to be the ultimate performance-driven medium, a place where you can find small niche audiences and track the effectiveness of ads in real time.
That’s what Randall Rothenberg thought before he took over recently as the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Instead, as he says in this scathing letter to audience measurement companies ComScore and Nielsen NetRatings, the science of counting eyeballs online has in some respects moved on little since the dotcom days:
We in the marketing-media ecosystem have spent too many years trying to clear up the residue of flawed media-research methodologies. We simply cannot let the internet, the most accountable medium ever invented, fall into the same bad customs that have hindered older media and angered advertisers for decades.
The target of his ire is the practice of estimating audience size based on representative panels of internet surfers. That technique was invented for radio 70 years ago: surely there must be a more accurate measurement system for an interactive medium like the internet?
ComScore had already preempted this tirade with research of its own claiming that the alterntive is even worse. This involves planting "cookies" on users’ computers, then using these unique identifiers to calculate how many different visitors come to a website in any given month. The trouble is, some internet users clean out their cookies frequently, so they are counted each time they return to a site as a new visitor. ComScore calculated that counting server log files like this could inflate an audience count by as much as two and a half times.
Following Mr Rothenberg’s challenge, both companies say they are ready to talk about a compromise (this is NetRatings’ response.)
This will not be universally welcomed. The IAB, after all, claims to represent Websites that carry the vast majority of online advertising in the US. Its complaint is that panel measurement greatly understates audience size – "by 2x to 3x magnitudes in some cases," as Mr Rothenberg put it. If the online publishers succeed in strong-arming the measurement companies into boosting the numbers, it could end up costing advertisers more money.
