Around the Net
The Great Traffic Debate
- The New York Times, Monday, October 22, 2007 10:33 AM
It is a great irony of the so-called "most measurable advertising medium" that the discrepancy between those who count Web traffic is so vast. Publishers count the number of visitors to their
sites, while advertisers and ad-serving firms collect data on those sites they do business with. All rely on third-party measurers like Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix when it comes to
doing business. Big-time money is changing hands here, which makes the discrepancy between the interested parties so troubling. Publishers claim that panel-based ratings firms
undercount those accessing Web sites from work, for example, particularly those operating under a corporate firewall. This adversely affects visitor counts on business-related sites, like NYTimes.com
and Forbes.com. Ratings companies accuse publishers of mixing international and domestic traffic and double-counting at-work and at-home users to beef up traffic figures.
For publishers,
the result is fewer ad dollars. "It's hugely frustrating," says Wenda Harris Millard, former Chief Sales Officer at Yahoo and now president for media at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. "It's one of
the barriers preventing us from really moving forward." Indeed, ad agencies like Starcom MediaVest Group have threatened publishers and ratings firms to sort out the mess (the latter are now being
audited themselves) - even a 5% discrepancy amounts to "meaningful money," says Mindshare Interaction CEO John Montgomery.
