Digging Deeper

The Problem with Web Measurement, Part 2

by Mark Glaser

With all the web traffic numbers and metrics floating around -- page views, unique visitors, time spent, sessions -- it's a wonder that anyone can agree to a simple advertising sale on a website. Complicating matters is that the advertising world is used to traditional measurement services such as Nielsen's TV ratings that rely on usage by controlled panels of people. Online, those panel-based services can rarely gauge traffic on sites with less than 500,000 unique visitors per month.

• August 1, 2007
• 1 comment

Your Take

What services do you trust for measuring web traffic to your site?

by Mark Glaser

I've been engrossed in the topic of web measurement the past couple weeks, with a two-part series here at MediaShift. In the first part, I wondered why the web, which is supposed to be the most measurable medium ever (putting TV and radio audience measurement to shame), is still so inconsistent with so few standards in place. If you write...

• July 30, 2007
• 3 comments

Digging Deeper

The Problem with Web Measurement, Part 1

by Mark Glaser

On April 19, 2007, the new CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Randall Rothenberg, sent a scathing open letter to the heads of the major web measurement firms, comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings, complaining that they better get their act together: Imagine my surprise when I came to the IAB and discovered that the main audience measurement companies are still...

• July 25, 2007
• 4 comments

Digging Deeper

Your Guide to Online Advertising

by Mark Glaser

The term online advertising refers to ads that are served via the Internet. Early online ads ran on dial-up services such as Prodigy, eventually coming to the World Wide Web in the mid-'90s as banner ads or graphical pictures embedded onto sites such as the Global Network Navigator (GNN) and HotWired. Rick Boyce, the director of business development at HotWired (the online arm of Wired magazine) at the time, helped push through the first banner ad campaigns in 1994, including the AT&T banner ad pictured here.

• June 27, 2007
• 16 comments

Digging Deeper

Nielsen BuzzMetrics Tries to Measure Buzz in Social Media

by Mark Glaser

Last year was a watershed for social media, with millions of people creating and sharing their own media on sites such as MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr and turning away from traditional one-way media such as TV, radio and newspapers. But for the proprietors of these new media sites, there's one very big problem: How do you make money off that popularity?

• January 3, 2007
• 11 comments