|
|
Quality Over Quantity: Net Ratings Set For Shake Up
Posted: Jul 12, 2007 08:06 AM by Douglas McIntyre
Nielsen NetRatings and comScore (Nasdaq: SCOR) are the two big players in measuring the audience of large websites. Advertising agencies and marketers rely on their numbers to make financial decisions about where to advertise on the web.
Now, Nielsen wants to change the rules, a move that could impact companies from AOL to Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG).
Old Ways
For a number of years, internet websites where measured on two basic metrics:
- Unique visitors per month. This showed how many people came to a site like MSN over a four week period, taking out duplication for people who came more than once.
- Pageviews. This system counted the number of total pages seen by all visitors to a website over the month's period.
The numbers are huge. In May, according to comScore, Yahoo!, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) sites including AOL, and Google all had over 100 million unique visitors in the United States. Pageviews for these sites could easily run into the billions each month.
The online advertising industry wanted more information about the behavior of visitors and pressured the two rating services to come up with additional information.
New Model, New Problems
Recently Nielsen decides to try to offer a solution to marketer's concerns. It created a new system that takes into account how much time consumers spend at each website. The argument is that a person who comes to a site for 15 minutes at a time has different goals than someone who comes for one minute.
Under the new Nielsen ratings, AOL is the No. 1 website in the United States with 25 billion minutes spent on its sites in May. In terms of its unique audience, AOL only ranks fourth with 91.6 million visitors. The new rankings hurt Google which only had 7.4 billion minutes spent in May. Its unique user base was 110.2 million.
Who Cares About Time Spent?
The new debate about internet audience focuses on whether time spent on a site really means anything. AOL has a number of visitors who come to the service for e-mail and instant messaging. These users may not be as attractive to advertisers as people coming to Google for a minute to look for something very specific.
It may take another year or two and a lot of arguing to determine whether the news measurement systems from Nielsen will be accepted. But, Google is making so much more money than other internet firms that it may not care.
Looking to cook up a market-stomping stock portfolio? Check out our FREE report "7 Ingredients to Market Beating Stocks" and get started right now!
Rate this Article:
Your Rating:
Overall Rating:
Vote Now!
MORE STOCK ANALYSIS
 Loading...
THE BEST OF INVESTOPEDIA
Loading...
|
CURRENT HIGH YIELD SAVINGS RATES
Rate data provided by
|
