• BusinessWeek, Tuesday, October 17, 2006 11:30 AM

It's not news that counting Web traffic isn't an exact science. If you're a Web publisher, you know that Nielsen//NetRatings, comScore and Alexa may have vastly different things to say about your Web audience.

That flies in the face of the impression that online advertising is the most dependably trackable ad medium of all time. But that's not stopping Google from buying a startup like YouTube for its high-volume traffic. Nielsen and comScore, the top two companies in Web measurement, employ consumer panels from a cross-section of the American public. They record the Web movements of real people and then compile traffic data based on that usage. Newer services, like Alexa and Hitwise, provide alternatives to panel data, the results of which can vary greatly.

So greatly that Meebo, a company that enables different instant-messaging programs to communicate over one platform, decided to publish all of its internal traffic data, inviting researchers from comScore to look at the company's server logs. That meeting ended in a stalemate.

Part of the problem is that Meebo uses Ajax, a technology for creating Web applications that records just one page view for every visit to the site. Other technologies like RSS (real simple syndication)--which lets people sign up to have Internet content delivered to their desktop or Web-based reader--pose similar problems for Web measurement firms, since they provide no page views.

For advertisers, it means they know they're using a flawed product, but that's something they're used to. It's no different than other media: Ratings are the standard currency that advertisers have been using forever. But now, in this technology-based age of countless data points, isn't it time for something better?

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