B&T publishes online numbers for first time, leaving AdNews as lone audit holdout

Oh look at that big blue rod, swelling to a perfect 10.

Screw the alphabet, I think the mumbrella bar belongs in the middle.

This doesn’t surprise me. Great work Mumbrella!

Which publication has the most click-bait?

Owing to proxy use, probably come as 20 to 30 unique users a month on Mumbrella, but behaviour like mine would be a tiny part of the sample.

Well done, Mumbrella. Great site.

Who would have thought that the Australian Anthroposophic Medicine Association and/or the Australian Arabic Medical Association would have been so interested as to audit the media trade press websites.

What is the point of this article other than to big up Mumbrella C’mon guys, you are better than that.

What is the point of this article other than to big up Mumbrella ? Disappointing to see Mumbrella stoop to this level.

What about unique users?

Awkward…way to blow your own trumpet

Yes how dare you Mumbrella publish your audience numbers.

Suspicious similarity behind “Sara” and “Amber” ‘s comments. From a grumpy rival?

Macca,

The answer on daily unique users is in the piece:

“In the new numbers, Mumbrella also led the market on average daily unique browsers, which was 10,278. This was followed by B&T, published by The Misfits Media Company, on 2,644 and Campaign Brief on 2,511.”

The industry ditched monthly uniques as a reliable number a good while ago. If somebody tries to sell you that, don’t trust them – it probably means they aren’t audited.

Credit to B&T.

They might be disappointed with that number, but at least they are being honest with the market.

They’re going to have to drop their ratecard though.

As for Adnews: who’d advertise with them at all? What possible legitimate reason have they got not to get an audit?

Yep Yup.

But just to clarify, the industry dumped monthly unique browsers (i.e. from a web traffic audit, or GA, Omniture etc) as they overstate reality by several orders of magnitude.

Average daily unique browsers was a more acceptable cohort as it was only overstating by single-digit to low double digits percentage wise. I suspect that this may have blown out further with the increase in smartphone usage but I don’t t have the data to hand to quantify it.

At the same time the industry also endorsed the Unique Audience metric, which was generated as a hybrid measure utilising tagged traffic data and the Nielsen panel.

Panels will always understate online audience because they can’t get sample in public places, universities, government, banking and defence institutions etc. Conversely server-based data will always overstate online audience because of device duplication, cookie deletion etc. The hybrid system uses the traffic counts of each website to establish the quantum of usage, then uses the panel to convert that usage to audience data based on the usage patterns observed in the panel.

Cheers.

Compare and contrast:

John Grono: “The industry dumped monthly unique browsers (i.e. from a web traffic audit, or GA, Omniture etc) as they overstate reality by several orders of magnitude.”

Adnews media kit: “95,000+ monthly website visitors” (unaudited)
http://www.yaffa.com.au/images.....IA-KIT.pdf

And don’t forget that B&T publishes more
Copies of the print edition than ad news.

Good find Jim Jams.

I also note that it says ‘monthly website visitors’. Is that unique? Is it cumulative? Is it average daily visitors?

In my experience every publisher quotes the biggest number they can find. One thing that came out of the agreement to standardise on ‘monthly unique audience’ (which of course will be much larger than the average daily audience) was that any media buyer worth their salt would see that non-standard definitions were being quoted and such claims would generally not be considered as part of the negotiation or buying process.

B & T – dead within 2 years… Mumbrealla has a chance if they stop bleeding ….as for Ad News, twas always worth a skim through over an espresso on Monday morning – unless they had an article about me….. as a game!, B&T and Ad News should have been shut down years ago…weekly, fortnightly, monthly, bi-monthly – neither set-up understood how to reliquish ad revenue for audience engagement…. At least Mumbreall puts a foot forward………

Quick call out to junior media buyers – if they are trying to sell you on a browser figure, make sure it is Australian traffic only.

By “they” I mean media sales people generally.

The AMAA provides audited web analytics for niche publisher websites, as per this article. I think what is not being acknowledged in comments here, or perhaps some are not aware, that many niche publishers do not have traffic at high enough levels to be properly represented in panel data and hence need to use tagged traffic data. If a site is too small, or too niche, it may well not be picked up by a panel, so these smaller sites often cannot really benefit from a hybrid platform as they will often fall below the acceptable level of traffic to obtain Unique Audience data. UB’s are valid as census based web traffic measurement, albeit not providing the same level of detailed data as a hybrid platform.
The AMAA service is designed to assist smaller sites to provide a credible, audited traffic number for their websites, that can then be utilised to benchmark them against competitors in their set.
John (Grono) you are correct that there are limitations with GA (or Omniture) data as due to the varying nature of how they may be set up site by site, comparing GA figures from one publisher to another is pointless. Hence the AMAA’s service is designed to ensure that the implementation, interpretation and reporting of web analytic data is standardised across all participating publishers.
Note: the acronym for the industry verification body, the Audited Media Association of Australia, is AMAA not AAMA as reported here.