RSSNielsen//NetRatings Blows Off IAB
A couple of months ago, the Interactive Advertising Bureau publicly called out Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore (in effect, the entire online measurement industry) for not being audited and standardized. IAB, N//NR, and comScore met and hashed it out. A whole bunch of acronyms showed up. Steps were taken. Press releases sent. Now, several months later, N//NR has taken the wind out of those sails and is poised to motor by the whole IAB regulation ship by declaring engagement to be king and setting out to measure it.
My suspicion is that IAB, along with all the metrics vendors, will get in line behind Nielsen. And why not? The institution of PVs/UVs is under attack from all angles, and marketers know this. The job of N//NR et al is to provide publishers with numbers they can use to improve their own business practices and to sell inventory. Engagement numbers will soon be the best numbers for doing that.
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Hi Jeremy: I was just about to blog on this at DogBytes. I am going to make a few calls into Nielsen to see what they are thinking about. My main issue is something that you mentioned above, namely standards. Measuring engagement is extremely tricky.
“Time spent” is something Nielsen has mentioned. Well, I have had a browser open with 6 tabs all weekend. What is the standard for measuring that? What about ‘forwarding’ something? Does that get tracked and weighted at a higher value? Content and RSS aggregators like Netvibes, etc. are open all the time, but the content exists somewhere else. Web-pages running Ajax applications act very differently than HTML server-driven sites and could seriously throw off metrics.
I like the concept of measuring engagement, but I do not envy them the challenge of defining all of the standards (and gathering all of the accurate data) that will be necessary to do it.
I also wonder about leaving tabs open and how that’s measured. I left all my tabs at work open all weekend. And what if a window is minimized? What about people that have macs and have multiple windows open at once on their screen? What if one open window is twice the size of the other?
I think the moral of the story here is that metrics are not perfect. For N//NR to be successful, it has to convince its clients of the value of its numbers. Its clients have to convince their clients. The key here is “convince”. This is a cynical point of view to take, I realize.
From a more industry-cheerleadery point of view, I think this development is relatively positive. The more “fundamental” metrics, the better. If I’m a seller, I want to have more arrows in my quiver. If I’m a Web publisher or an editor, I want to have a more info to refer to to see how many people are visiting and engaging with my sites. And if I’m a marketer, I want to have every tool at my disposal before making placement decisions.