Not so online. In May, comScore gave Yahoo 34 million more unique visitors (167 million) than Nielsen did (133 million). But it probably won’t cost Yahoo a penny if everyone believes the lower number, because Yahoo isn’t selling its total reach. Instead, Yahoo and other sites sell “ad impressions,” or sometimes actual “clicks,” which tally up one by one. Every time a banner loads up in front of you, the advertiser owes a little more money.
Advertisers and agencies still use third-party ratings to plan their campaigns. And sites with demographically appealing audiences, like the Times and the Journal, will flaunt those statistics to entice marketing departments. But this sort of planning is less decisive since advertisers can watch their campaigns play out live and make adjustments on the fly, based on which Web sites send more customers their way.
This is not to say that accuracy is passé. Some number of people was drawn to The Miami Herald’s Haiti coverage, and it would be helpful to know what that number is. “There are a lot of optional, high-cost, high-effort editorial projects a newspaper can choose to pursue,” says Rick Hirsch. “I wish I had the data to guide these editorial choices. Ironically, it’s still like being a traditional editor, making calls based on your gut instinct—you have more data, but it’s conflicting.”
One way through the morass is for publishers to learn to ignore the numbers they don’t trust. It seems inevitable that, over time, this will mean more emphasis on mining their own server stats. For the last year, the Times, Gawker, TPM, and other outlets have been testing a site-analysis tool called ChartBeat that focuses on the last fifteen seconds of activity at their sites: what people are reading, commenting on, searching for, linking to, and Twittering about. One startling revelation at TPM: almost all of the audience drops off before the halfway point of longer pieces. Such real-time diagnostics raises thorny journalistic questions, but it also makes monthly site rankings seem irrelevant.
And what about the clarity the industry yearns for? The only way to imbue an audience number with anything like the authority of the old TV ratings is with a new monopoly—if either Nielsen or comScore folds or, more likely, they merge. That kind of authority won’t mean greater accuracy, just less argument. Advertisers don’t need it, and Web sites shouldn’t want it.
This article was adapted from “Chaos Online: How a Faulty Metrics Affect Digital Journalism,” a report written by Graves, John Kelly, and Marissa Gluck. It was commissioned by Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and funding for the research was provided by Mary Graham, a member of the school’s Board of Visitors. The full report is available at www.journalism.columbia.edu/onlinedata.
This article makes me think that some open cookie standard would help. For one thing, the cookie would be regulated, which would be good for users. But it could be a source of clout for the social networks as well. A news viewer may access the same site from several computers, but one thing those computers have in common is that cookie they get from Twitter or Facebook or google.
Cookies.
#1 Posted by Http://mostmodernist.com, CJR on Wed 8 Sep 2010 at 11:58 AM
This article makes me think that some open cookie standard would help.
For one thing, the cookie would be regulated, which would be good for
users. But it could be a source of clout for the social networks as
well. A news viewer may access the same site from several computers,
but one thing those computers have in common is that cookie they get
from Twitter or Facebook or google.
Cookies.
http:twitter.com/mostmodernist
#2 Posted by mostmodernist, CJR on Wed 8 Sep 2010 at 12:05 PM
Ratings and measurement systems generally give me an upset stomach.
As the article implies, Nielsen's monopoly over television ratings has raised questions for years about how numbers are generated, tracked, manipulated, and published. I've spent more than a few nights looking at TV ratings, week-by-week, year-over-year or what-have-you, and my view is such that complacency with a crooked system is just as bad as being in promotion of said system. Set top box data? Some people have legitimate concerns about it, but it's a shame others refuse it just because the new technology would force market researchers to be a little better at their job.
#3 Posted by Aaron B., CJR on Wed 8 Sep 2010 at 12:26 PM
"But Nielsen’s numbers are better than nothing at all, and that’s what radio or TV broadcasting offers: no way to detect whether 5,000 people tuned in, or 5 million."
In the age of digital TV this makes little sense to me. If the cable and sat TV companies got together, they could tally an actual count of viewers. They could also indicate how many people actually watch commercials... (not many)... which is probably why they don't report this stuff. I imagine they are doing this kind of research anyway - for their own internal optimization purposes. But the idea that Nielsen is the only option out there seems wrong to me. There are plenty of ways to "detect," either by tallying actual numbers or using a statistically significant sample size. It just seems that there's no interest in doing it.... at least not for public consumption.
#4 Posted by ms, CJR on Wed 8 Sep 2010 at 02:25 PM
Another factor that's totally disregarded by the measurement services: the percentage of hits generated by non-humans (i.e. bots, crawlers, etc. etc.) According to TownNews.com, which hosts more than 1,000 newspaper websites, almost 70 percent of the traffic it tracked in January 2010 was generated by spiders, bots and other web crawling creatures. Not a pair of eyes among em.....
#5 Posted by Chucolo, CJR on Wed 8 Sep 2010 at 03:38 PM
Yes, some may count non-human (robot & spider) traffic. But many publishers using server- or client-side counting use (1) the IAB Robot/Spider list and (2) Dynamic Filtering to detect non-human traffic so they get a clean look at their real traffic. A CEO running a Digital Company has material motivation to understand this difference.
The Council for Research Excellence recently published a paper on Set Top Data and you should be able to find that at http://researchexcellence.com/committees/settopbox_committee.php
Nielsen, Arbitron and others are audited by the Media Ratings Council to provide the transparency and accountability spoken of. You are absolutely correct; the state of Digital Measurement is not what we need it to be today. And of more concern should be the challenge of keeping pace in a world of proliferating mobile apps.
#6 Posted by Dan Murphy, CJR on Tue 14 Sep 2010 at 07:52 AM
If editors are looking for useful data on which to base editorial decisions, I'd recommend our Newstogram platform. It goes beyond telling you what stories are popular to showing you the topics and entities that are trending across multiple stories.
#7 Posted by Neil Budde, CJR on Mon 20 Sep 2010 at 01:03 PM
I havden't read all the commenta, so this may have already been pointed out, but third party companies like Scarborough and Gallup determine the readership number, and ABC certifies the number of copies sold.
#8 Posted by peter Sullivan , CJR on Tue 5 Oct 2010 at 03:33 PM
Interesting report. I imagine it is useful for journalists and other media professionals working in large news-based media companies.
The point made towards the end of the report on the difference between big media and small media with regards to the relative obscurity of small media in most of the third party produced metrics needs to be properly explained.
Another tricky problem is reconciling the focus on journalism with the reality of the non-journalistic or quasi-journalistic media of the internet. That is, advertisers are interested in what consumers are interested in and consumers are not always interested in news.
Lastly, a minor point, for the niche media who service smaller audiences and who may integrate other features ('brand extensions') into their sites beyond content-based 'news' (forums, video, classifieds, etc.).
#9 Posted by Glen Fuller, CJR on Wed 26 Jan 2011 at 08:00 PM