It's not surprising that the youngest Web visitors are typically exposed to a low level of advertising clutter, since Web sites designed for children have little to no advertising. But even teens, the highest indexing age group on MySpace, encounter relatively low clutter levels. The study suggests that more niche Web sites, which attract smaller audiences, tend to have higher areas of clutter.

Advertisers and publishers struggle to define the balance of content and advertising, but Jon Gibs, VP, media analytics, Nielsen Online, suggests that the best strategy is not simply to find Web sites with the lowest advertising clutter, but to take advantage of the perfect combination of Web traffic, advertising volume and demographic targeting.

Gibs suggests to avoid following the myth that the longer the page the more ads it can accommodate, the more time a visitor spends on a page the more ads they can consume, and smaller ads create less visual information.

This new advertising metric from Nielsen Online's syndicated Web audience, engagement and advertising data aims to help media buyers identify the correct levels of ad clutter and volume to reach their online target audience efficiently in campaigns. It focuses on ad impression, page view, time spent and ad pixel data. Nielsen said the data will give publishers insight to more effectively sell ad inventory by offering space with suitable clutter levels.

A suitable clutter level depends on the comfort level of a specific advertiser, the target audience and online environment. Lower-income households are typically more comfortable with higher levels of clutter, whereas high-income households prefer lower, according to Gibs. "Retail stores consumers visit tend to mirror their online advertising comfort levels," he said.

Gibs said media planners can buy against this metric and publishers can justify higher CPM levels, whereas in the past they might have been forced to add inventory to generate more revenue.

Combined with other metrics, such as unique audience, Nielsen's clutter measurement tool should provide a benchmark to help media buyers understand the Web sites that provide the optimal level of impressions within an acceptable amount of clutter. The service measures clutter by taking ad impressions from the AdRelevance service, page views from NetView Report Manager, and pixel weight, a modifier score that looks at ad size on a page.

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