• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, October 24, 2002

It’s time for online media to grow up.

In a white paper titled "Internet Metrics: The Loyal Audience," published by the Online Publishers Association, it says, "The most widely quoted metric on the Internet is 30-day cumulative Reach (‘Total Reach’), an estimate of the number of different people who have viewed at least one page on a particular site over the course of the measured month."

Each of the major ratings companies publishes rankings of sites and properties monthly, basing those rankings on Total Reach. Unlike in other media, however, the primary audience measurement metric, Total Reach, is not an estimate of the number of people who have an opportunity to see an ad placed on the site. Rather, Total Reach is a measure that describes the site’s overall ability to attract any viewer at least once during the month, with no indication of the quality or advertising value of those viewers, or of the site’s ability to deliver that audience for an advertiser.

According to the study, the heaviest 20% of users accounted for more than 64% of the sites’ traffic, and the heaviest 40% accounted for 85% of the traffic. Therefore, ratings, that focus on a publisher’s total reach numbers dramatically inflate the effective size of a site’s audience. It’s like USA Today including the number of people who scanned the front page of their newspaper through the window in one of their vending boxes in total reach.

Is this bad news for publishers? Will forcing the services to change their presentation of reach statistics kill their value to media buyers? Absolutely not! Or, at least not for those with high quality loyal audiences.

The real story uncovered by the OPA research is that "some unique visitors count more than others." The research indicates that loyal audiences dominate the OPA sites. "Loyal Users [frequent site visitors] consistently account for the vast majority of site traffic and advertising exposure across all sites."

In other words, while the 30-day total reach number inflates the effective size of sites’ audiences, the numbers also overshadows the underlying value of the audience. In an industry that is striving to prove its ability as a branding medium, the ability to deliver loyal audience frequently is more important than the ability to just redirect traffic. As referenced in the OPA report, Dynamic Logic studies have found that "the branding value of online advertising continues to increase from one to five exposures."

It’s time for online media to grow up. If we want respect and premium pricing from advertisers and marketers, we have to throw out irrelevant metrics like "30-day total reach" and fully embrace traditional media metrics that better articulate the true value of a publisher’s audience. Of course, once the focus shifts to the quality of an audience, and questions like, "Who are they?", "How loyal are they?", and "How valuable are they?" start being asked, lots of new issues will dominate … but that’s a story for another day.

Dave Morgan is the President and CEO of Tacoda Systems, Inc. He can be reached at dave@tacoda.com.