• by Shankar Gupta , April 26, 2005

Internet audience auditing firm I/PRO announced yesterday at Ad:Tech a partnership with Mediamark Research, Inc., to study the audiences of mid-tier sites that may have been overlooked by media buyers with their eyes on the top 50 Web sites.

I/PRO and MRI plan to offer two reports, an Audience Profile Report and the Business Demographics Report--each of which examines a different aspect of a Web site's audience. The audience profile will look at data such as gender, income, education, and presence of children, while the business demographics report examines job title, job function, corporate size, and purchasing authority. I/PRO plans to charge $5,000 for a standard survey, and $12,500 for a customizable survey, with the standard questions plus up to 10 customizable research questions.

Allan Kaplan, I/PRO's CEO, unveiled the partnership at Ad:Tech by demonstrating a sample survey for a snowboarding site called OnTheSnow.com. OnTheSnow has a dedicated audience with a lot of disposable income, but is often overlooked by media buyers who don't have the data to target to them appropriately, said I/PRO's vice president of marketing, David Barlin.

"They're exactly the type of site that has a really passionate audience, a really important audience, but they're exactly the kind of site that can be overlooked or understated," said Barlin. "What we found was that they have this great audience of athletic, highly educated, high-household-income men that, given the basic data that media buyers work from, would not be presumed to be on that site." According to Barlin, I/PRO has already produced similar studies for several mid-tier sites, but declined to name any others. The sites' audiences are profiled using standardized surveys, delivered via pop-ups that intercept a number of site users--631 in the case of OnTheSnow--and question them as to their demographic data.

Barlin said that this service is designed to help sites collect data on their audiences that they can show to media buyers in order to better monetize their content. "If you want to do anything beyond just selling on your content, you need to show your demographic," said Barlin. "In the case of OnTheSnow, from the media buying side, close to a million folks who tend to be highly educated and have high household income that would've otherwise been overlooked is a powerful thing."