The numbers are in, and once again it’s Yahoo! on top. The company today happily announced that it has again earned the top ranking as the world's most trafficked Internet destination, according to the Nielsen//NetRatings' November 2001 Global Internet Index.

For everyone who wishes traditional advertisers would pay more attention to the Internet as an ad medium, I have really good news.

We've put both the highlights of the IAB Measurement and Audit Guidelines presentation on Tuesday and my conversation with IAB CEO Greg Stuart up on the MediaPost website, so check it out for his comments on the significance of the announcement, the timing of the release and some specific recommendations.

Here's an interesting factoid - the Nielsen//NetRatings Global WebWatch data for November found that the audiences of the top 10 global properties were all predominantly male.

comScore Networks today announced the results of the first complete review of consumer e-commerce for the year 2001, reporting that sales at domestic online retailers surged to $53 billion for the year.

With much fanfare, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today issued a set of ad measurement guidelines for the industry to adopt and follow. Hailed by some as a "landmark," the guidelines are based on independently conducted PricewaterhouseCoopers study and input from the Advertising Research Foundation, Media Rating Council, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Association of National Advertisers - quite a roster, wouldn't you say? The guidelines deal with issues that have long plagued the online ad industry: measuring ad impressions, clicks, page impressions, and visitors and verifying ad delivery. Truth be told, they fall a little short …

I know I said I wouldn't talk about the online holiday shopping season anymore unless something significant happened, and though you may disagree with me, I think the fact that online retailers can quickly learn from their mistakes is a fairly significant finding, so here it is.

It could have something to do with the laziness of the holidays or with the fact that DoubleClick was very secretive about this latest development, but I completely missed them shutting down their Intelligent Targeting Unit at the end of December. ITU was the part of DoubleClick that focused on selling profile targeted ads and provided Intelligent Targeting technology to its DART ad serving customers - all of that is now gone. What's left? DoubleClick will continue to sell impressions, but only in run-of-network or run-of-site buys, or targeted via cookie-based criteria. The significance of this move, …

A few months ago I reported that the Online Publishers Association (OPA) was getting ready to study the media consumption habits of U.S. consumers and this week, as promised, the results are in. The complete results are available at the OPA website, but here are some salient points: The study profiles consumers who had accessed the Internet from work in the past 30 days ("at-work users"), and contrasts them with Internet users who hadn't ("non-work users"), and findings suggest that compared to at-home users, at work users (about 52.8 million of them) are significantly more likely to …

I don’t often endorse products, and I almost never – jaded grouch that I’ve become – get very excited when someone enthusiastically shows me their new creation, but the stars must have been lined up just right this afternoon when I met with eMarketer. This NY-based research firm is well trusted and well known for taking confusing and conflicting research reports and making sense of them for the rest of us. Somewhere in the middle of talking about the market downturn and the plethora of numbers they still crunch everyday, they mentioned – very matter-of-factly – a database …