A better way to count clicks?

A correction was made to this story. Read below for details.

Web publishers may soon have to change the way they count visitor traffic, whether they like it or not.

An Internet standards body is hammering out new rules for tallying traffic numbers on Web sites and their content partners, in an initiative called the Nomenclature Project. Under changes proposed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its members, publishers will have to work under more stringent rules about what can and can't be counted as part of their site.

One prominent issue comes down to branding. For example, sports news site ESPN.com attracts an estimated 15 million unique visitors a month, according to the audience-metric firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Included in its traffic are an estimated 1.2 million unique visitors from content partner Active.com, an activity event site that displays a small logo from ESPN.com at the top right-hand corner of its pages.

Theoretically, under proposed rules that are still being worked out, ESPN would have to change Active.com's pages in order to count that traffic. In fact, ESPN must be the dominant brand on the page, or comprise 75 percent of the brand attribution, in order to count it, according to proposed rules. ESPN could not be immediately reached for comment.

Everybody suffered a little pain, but it's for the gain of the overall industry and the audience measurement business.

--Leo Scullin,
vice president, IAB

This change could affect ESPN.com's rivalry with the likes of No. 2 sports-news site, FoxSports.com, which according to Nielsen, draws about 13 million unique visitors monthly. However, FoxSports.com, a channel on MSN, might have to change branding on one of its popular sites, Scout.com, for it to retain the same traffic figures. "I'm keenly interested and support this project," said Andrew Hossom, director of marketing at FoxSports.com.

Why is this important? In one word--advertising. The sites with a bigger audience can command more advertising dollars. And up to now, there's been no one way that everyone agrees to tally that Web traffic. Nomenclature Project organizers hope the changes, which are not yet finalized and should go into effect in the middle of next year, will help Web publishers and their advertisers get a better understanding of how many people are visiting which sites, and how often.

"The measurement companies have had different hierarchies, and each partner site was able to roll up traffic in different ways, causing great consternation around the industry," said Leo Scullin, an IAB vice president who is driving the initiative.

The project has been in the works for the last two years. Scullin agrees that it could cause problems for some publishers, but he believes those issues have been identified well before the rules changes takes place.

"Everybody suffered a little pain, but it's for the gain of the overall industry and the audience measurement business," Scullin added

A maturing medium
IAB company members are working on the project with audience measurement firms including ComScore and Nielsen. Other IAB members include Yahoo, MSN and CNET, publisher of News.com. ComScore did not return a request for comment.

Mike Saxon, Nielsen's vice president of media products, said the project is remarkable because publishers are working hard to put aside competitive differences to settle on much-needed standards for counting traffic.

"The primary goal is to make investors and advertisers comfortable," said Saxon, who is working with the IAB committee on the project. He said Nielsen supports the changes, but he's unclear whether they will take effect next year.

The initiative is part of a long-running campaign by the Web publishing industry to cast the Internet as a mature, accountable medium for advertising. More importantly, it's designed to make Web ads easy for advertisers to buy, so that traditional advertisers of TV, print and radio will be comfortable shifting their spending to the Internet.

The changes come at a time when industry ad sales are steadily growing. Interactive ad sales are rising at roughly 25 percent

 

Correction: This story incorrectly stated the number of people at home that Nielsen/NetRatings monitors to estimate total traffic to Web sites. The company draws such data from 24,000 people.

[jasonemanuelson1]

Whatever

Lets see how complicated and convoluted we can make stats
tracking. Understanding advertising on the web is already hard
for businesses. It also add needless accounting policies and
procedures and make advertising for small businesses. This is
what happens when you let accountants run a stats engine.

*** ducks for incoming flaming beans ***

[dingleberry420]

agreed

Seems pretty silly to have to rely on others sites to tally your sites unique visitors. Honestly, I didn't even finish reading the whole article. This story made me think "what the ***** are these guys on?!"