Audited sites go dark on data as Nielsen arrangement ends
Online publishers will be without an audited online metric for at least the next month after the Audited Media Association of Australia finally called an end to its relationship with Nielsen.
It was already known that the AMAA’s arrangement with Nielsen would come to an end after the company declined to join a tender for the business.
It is believed that ComScore and Effective Measure are the two suppliers vying for the account.
After the tender process took longer than anticipated, Nielsen offered to temporarily go on providing the data to publishers which extended coverage through September.
There seems to be a lot of confusion between Page Impressions (stuff served by a computer) and Page Views (stuff seen by a person). The former will always be higher than the latter.
I wonder if in the above example whether international, bots & spiders, and internal traffic was removed from the publisher data. The lack of understanding of the difference between traffic and audience is a blight on the Australian industry.
I also just wonder, does anyone accept ‘Publisher Claims’? What if a TV station decided to bring out its own TV ratings – would we accept that. Or a billboard owner with its own count of traffic and eyeballs. No. So why should we accept internal server data as being infallible?
“It makes sense for there now to be a break before we move to the new provider.”
I can’t see how it does?
Jerry,
Regarding your comment, I agree the industry should be better informed on the key metrics.
But in making your comment you miss the important point: in our blog post we outlined the data from three independent audience measurement tools (none of which use “internal server data”). The point was entirely that these are third-party services; not our own numbers.
Regarding Nielsen’s comment, we appreciate they are working on rectifying the issues with Hybrid.
However, as our blog points out, the Hybrid Page Impression figure was half that two other third-party measuring tools and – importantly – also half of Nielsen’s own NetRatings report.
This is why we stopped using Nielsen – there appears to be little or no input from NetRatings into Hybrid, despite the suggestion in the comment above that it does.
The key point in all this is that, from our experience, Hybrid is not an accurate audience reporting tool for smaller sites, as it currently stands.
We’d like to work with Nielsen to improve it, but we think the market would benefit from understanding its limitations when forming views based on the data it presents.