• by Masha Geller , March 10, 2003

The two superpowers of the online measurement world picked March 10 as the day to launch nearly identical tools. Yesterday morning, within two hours of each other, comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen//NetRatings announced that both would offer daypart analysis tools.

“Daypart data represent a critical step in improving the measurement, planning and buying of the evolving online medium,” said Adam Gerber, senior partner and director of media strategy for The Digital Edge, the online media planning and buying arm of WPP’s Mediaedge:cia. “To date, many media buyers have had to buy dayparts relying purely on intuition,” he added. “Clearly, having solid data to support planning and buying decisions is a fantastic step forward.”

comScore’s new analysis tools are fully integrated with the company’s syndicated audience measurement database and are available to comScore Media Metrix Clients through the MyMetrix reporting system. The daypart tool, scheduled to become available at the end of the month, lets planners segment media spending by time of day and day of week, allowing them to more efficiently reach at-work users, for one, by segmenting online media properties with a higher concentration of visitors during the prized Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm daypart. Other standard dayparts, including early weekday morning, weekday evening and weekends, are also available.

comScore Media Metrix officials say they can also produce custom daypart analyses based on unique, client defined specifications, merging virtually any combination of time of day, demographic, usage location, and other variables.

The Nielsen//NetRatings relative equivalent to comScore’s daypart tool is the Internet Pocketpiece, which the company developed with the help of About, Inc. and PRIMEDIA as charter clients.

According to NetRatings, the Internet Pocketpiece, available as of yesterday, provides a top-line view of the monthly traffic for the top 250 ad-supported websites as measured by Nielsen//NetRatings. This unique deliverable removes all non-ad-supported sites from the data to specifically target the websites important to the competitive analysis most advertisers conduct regularly. This tool focuses on measuring dayparts for websites across various metrics including unique visitors, active reach, the percent of time spent, as well as key demographic breakdowns.

David Hills, COO and president of sales at About, Inc. said the Pocketpiece provides buyers and sellers with better audience data that “makes online media more easily comparable to other measured media."

The concept of daypart targeting online has been a hot debate topic ever since the Online Publishers Association discovered that “daytime is primetime on the web,” and last month the OPA partnered with Nielsen//NetRatings to figure out where the natural breaks in the dayparts occur.

The result was a 50-page white paper titled The Existence and Characteristics of Dayparts on the Internet, which concluded that five distinct dayparts exist on the Internet: Early Morning (M-F, 6am-8am), Daytime (M-F, 8am-5pm), Evening (M-F, 5pm-11pm), Late Night (M-F, 11pm-6am), and Weekends (Sat-Sun, all day). The study confirmed that Daytime is the largest daypart (measured in terms of both total audience and total usage minutes), followed by Evenings and Weekends.

OPA research also showed that affluent, working people between the ages of 25-54 make up a larger share of the Daytime audience than any other daypart, while children under the age of 18 are three times more likely to be reached during the Evening and Weekend dayparts.