It’s time for online media to grow up. In a white paper titled "Internet Metrics: The Loyal Audience," published by the Online Publishers Association, it says, "The most widely quoted metric on the Internet is 30-day cumulative Reach (‘Total Reach’), an estimate of the number of different people who have viewed at least one page on a particular site over the course of the measured month." Each of the major ratings companies publishes rankings of sites and properties monthly, basing those rankings on Total Reach. Unlike in other media, however, the primary audience measurement metric, Total Reach, is …

Founded in 1996 as the Internet Advertising Bureau, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has one goal: to convince marketers to increase the interactive portion of their overall marketing mix. That’s a tall order in today’s tight economic climate, even though the recession is said to be over and the online advertising industry has almost come out of the dust created by the infamous dot-com bubble burst. Believe it or not, there are still people out there who don’t believe in Internet advertising — and that way of thinking is the biggest obstacle in Greg Stuart’s way. Stuart was officially …

It’s not easy to please the online advertising crowd these days. The dot-com implosion has turned them into a bunch of skeptics who couldn’t care less about a company’s mission statement, even if the boilerplate language promises to place agencies’ needs on the proverbial pedestal. They want to see results, and nothing else matters. That’s why Atlas DMT is so unique. It actually delivers on that promise. “Our core mission is to make agencies more profitable at doing Internet media,” says Tom Sperry, president of Atlas DMT — a company hailed by many online ad professionals as simply the best …

A few months ago, when WebSideStory found that "meta refresh" URL redirects can inflate website traffic figures by as much as 30%, many non-techies weren’t too clear on what the study was really about. Everyone is familiar with robots, spiders, and other pesky critters that add to site traffic counts, but what exactly is a meta refresh redirect, what does it do, and, most importantly, how does it compare to a "302 redirect" — an equally unclear method recommended by the IAB and seemingly preferred by online advertisers? Web serving software uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and HTTP status …

What do people do when they visit a particular website? Where do they go after the homepage? What do they click on? What attracts and holds their attention and what makes them leave? Many websites have long looked at visitor behavior as the missing piece of the puzzle in maintaining a successful site, and online advertisers have long lusted after that kind of information. This month’s ClickPick — WebSideStory’s browser-based HitBox Enterprise — provides a solution to the problem. Simply put, the newly-patented HitBox can tell you just about everything you could ever want to know about user activity …

CRMCan Email Brand?by Amy Corr, amyc@mediapost.com The big question used to be, "Can the Web brand?" The answer is, of course, yes. But the industry has moved on and now the burning question is, "Can email brand?" "Email tends to be seen as a direct response mechanism. Email is very effective at branding, but it is not sold that way," says Nick Nyhan, president of Dynamic Logic, a research firm that has taken it upon itself to prove email’s branding powers to the world. New York–based Dynamic Logic has already made a name for itself with …

When NetRatings and Jupiter Media Metrix had their proposed merger kiboshed by federal regulators a few months ago, many were unsure of what would happen to the suite of useful services JMM used to offer. One was AdRelevance, which is now safe in the arms of NetRatings. The other was AiM, a site profiler tool, which passed into the hands of comScore in the beginning of June as part of comScore’s $1.5 million acquisition of JMM’s remains. AiM allows planners and buyers to determine which sites index highest among all sorts of behavioral, psychographic, and demographic factors. In …

For MaxWorldwide (the ad network formally known as L90), the past few months have been busy. Not only did the company purchase DoubleClick’s media business, realizing DoubleClick’s dream to be known as a pure play technology company, it also moved the company headquarters from California to New York and "removed employees that handled accounts questionably in the past," as Mitchell Cannold, the new President and CEO of MaxWorldwide, puts it. As a result, Cannold says, they’ve succeeded in bringing together two struggling companies and made them into the largest ad network out there, with little client overlap. Despite …