• CNet News, Tuesday, December 20, 2005 10:15 AM

The Internet Advertising Bureau is laying out new rules about audience attribution in an attempt to make counting traffic, a crucial Internet advertising metric, a more uniform process. Under the new rules, ESPN.com's 15 million monthly unique visitors, as measured by audience measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings, could be scrutinized, because an estimated 1.2 million unique visitors are included in its total traffic that are now classified as coming from Active.com, a content partner which display's ESPN's logo in the upper right-hand corner of its pages. The IAB says ESPN must clearly be the dominant brand on a page or make up 75 percent of the brand attribution in order to count the page towards the total audience. The online advertising association calls the new initiative, which has been in the works for two years, the Nomenclature Project. The IAB will instate it in the middle of 2006.

Read the whole story at CNet News »