• by August 17, 2000

Much of the talk at the Jupiter Forum in New York this week has been about ad impressions. Advertising networks are very protective of their rankings in terms of how many impressions they serve, and we owe one an apology. In the July issue of our Media magazine, we listed Engage Media, the second largest advertising network in the online ad world, as serving considerably fewer impressions than they actually do.

For the official record, the network serves nearly 7 billion impressions a month and is located at http://www.engage.com (not to be confused, as we did in our print issue, with engagemedia.com.)

And since we're on the subject of impressions, does an impression count when a website requests an ad from an ad server or when the ad is actually downloaded onto a user's screen?

The latest issue of Digitrends magazine examines this problem in detail and as Tim Harris, Associate Director of Starcom IP writes, "no advertiser will agree that a page-load is the definition of impression when the page-load doesn't include the fully loaded ad unit, unless the ad is part of the content on the page itself."

His article goes on to say that the closer our industry can get to a definition of impression that means "an individual ad viewing (not just having the opportunity to view), the happier marketers will be."

The Jupiter Forum didn't offer any answers, but their latest research study says online advertising revenues will reach $16.5 billion by 2005. That's a whole lot of impressions and contracts, so if we don't come up with sensible standards soon, we're looking at wasting millions of hours doing senseless tasks.

Here's to optimism!