News Ltd tops for online news; Fairfax leads on pages; NineMSN browsers grow fastest

Time spent is not a good indicator either, although sessions per user is, and is probably the only good indicator for the effectiveness of a media outlet.

I wonder what impact the recent escalation in invasive advertising – the popups, large Flash animations,uninvited video playbacks, etc – will have on future numbers? I’ve been pleasantly surprised how many people I know have brought their anger up in conversation and have either reduced their usage or stopped using sites like SMH all together because of it. Hopefully enough people will do likewise and media companies will get the hint…

@Adam- I couldn’t agree more. I personally don’t access any Fairfax properties anymore if I can avoid it because I am sick of autoplay videos with full sound and popups/popunders.

I’ll be interested to see if the steady increase of this type of advertising effects the use of these sites by non-marketer audiences or if people really just dont care if they have invasive advertising served to them and its only us industry folk who get shitted off by it.

Public may not quite be grateful for advertising but majority of consumers do realise it pays the bills for much of the content they enjoy. ‘Us industry folk’ tend to lose perspective of reality at times

@X – That’s what I though too, but the people I mentioned aren’t industry types, just regular punters, so for them to bring it up without persuasion must be an indicator of something…

@Joel – I was talking with an ex-Fairfax employee recently and he said that management was wrapped with the auto-play videos dues to their extremely high “visitor interaction”. Apparently they count people hitting the “X” button as interaction which is why the number is so high! I just love stumbling across Fairfax (or NineMSN for that matter) pages at 3 in the morning when you’ve forgotten you’ve left your speakers on only to be blasted by some friggin’ video you didn’t ask for…

@ Adam – ‘Interaction’ does NOT include ‘Close/X’. You’ve been misguided. Speak to your rich media supplier to confirm

Thanks for the clarification – doesn’t make them any less infuriating though…

Fairfax using pagination on their news stories so they get two clicks for every news story compared to News Ltd. So, News Ltd. is probably a lot farther ahead than Fairfax would like to think.

Let’s add to the discussion that the fairfax sites refresh every couple of minutes regardless of wheher there is new material or not. This runs across all of their sites I think and gives us a totally unrealistic page impression count.
I’m glad I’m not one of those poor advertisers who decide to advertise or pay based on those ridiculous numbers.
I’m not sure if others carry out this apparently deceptive practice.

Seems like smoke and mirrors to me. these figures are getting more and more cloudy and gamed each month. Digital might be the new outdoor – lots of cowboys.

Great spin for News Ltd but the news and weather category in which they’re claiming their win is virtually meaningless. That can be won and lost through acquisition of sites/mastheads. Buy another regional network or set up a site like the Punch and throw it in the bucket. The category most people in editorial/content use to judge their success is by site/masthead. The key metric is unique browsers, which is our best measure of audience size. I’ll declare an interest. I look after ninemsn’s Nine News, which is No.1 by both average daily unique browsers and total monthly unique browsers. For June, in Nielsen Netratings, we increased our lead over second-placed smh.com.au to more than 100,000 average daily UBs. News Ltd’s News.com.au was third, 90,000 daily UBs behind the smh.

Following on from Alex’s comments above, all three of these publishers use automated scripted page refreshes across various pages on their sites, ranging from 4 minutes to 15 minutes. So the page reloads (and counts as a hit in the stats) even when a user is not looking at the site – eg: when you open multiple tabs, and are looking at another site in another tab.

These “publisher initiated” page views are counting toward the overall PI’s and session duration/time spent, and inflating them. So really, until page refresh is removed from all sites, UB’s is the only metric that should matter.

Rhys I’m not so sure the publisher initiated pageviews are inflating figures. Look at duration per page generally across the news category (and most categories) – it’s 2/10’s of bugger all.

Most people dont last 4-15 mins on one site let alone one page in this category.

Huntzie – question. How important to you guys (ie EP’s/heads of key news properties) is session duration and repeat traffic. My feeling is UB in isolation is an empty metric as it’s the easiest to manipulate.

Ben – less important than UBs. Monthly UBs are easier to manipulate if you have a big network to play with (News, Fairfax and ninemsn) although I don’t see a hell of a lot of that going on. It’s more likely to happen with new/smaller sites on big networks. Average daily UBs are probably the most accurate, most difficult to game, metric. In my opinion, session duration is less important than total time per UB. Repeat traffic/frequency is an important metric and forms part of the statistical story of a site – eg. how the site is used in the audience’s daily news diet. But average daily UBs take any gaming bias out of the UB figure.

what happens though when 2 sites have similar UB numbers (lets say daily) but one site’s users stick around for 10 mins longer and consumer 5x pages of the other site?

then you could argue the UB per day figure is somewhat being played as there’s a big difference between a quick glance a longer stare (to borrow from someone else)

and that’s not a hypothetical. some operators practice this.

I can share one interesting fact regarding page refresh and its effect on web statistics. On one of the many News Ltd masthead redesigns at NDM the auto-refresh command was left off one of the state sites. Amazingly no one noticed for about six weeks !

But the effect on stats was an approximate 40 per cent drop in page impressions.

I think the lack of consensus on measurement methodologies and interpretations highights the importance of pay-per-performance ad deals.

The more these networks claim to have had success – the more manipulation that goes on.

None of the so-called ‘big three’ can put their hands on their hearts and genuinely claim their numbers are merely an indication of a flood of new and engaged users.

Huntie conveniently leaves out the latency factor – log out of hotmail, spat onto ninemsn. Open IE – ninemsn is the default homepage. SO logging out of hotmail and clicking on one tabloid story then buggering off is hardly an engaged user… ;ook closely at the Nielsen ratings and you could argue that ninemsn has the LEAST engagement out of the three.

Huntzie is right in one area – repeat traffic is important. But I wonder where ninemsn would be without all of its MSN-fuelled tricks to dump users onto its homepage anytime you go near an MSN product in Australia?

Regardless in the medium to long term most of these metrics will mean nothing – as advertisers move to new media as their primary ad spend – trumped up PIs and skewed UB metrics will come under much more scrutiny and new benchmarks

One of the problems is that you can look at these stats and prove anything you like. And managers do. Without their auto-refresh NDM sites would be running at about half their claimed hits.

And what about bounce rates ? A huge percentage of users stay less than 30 seconds. How important should they be ?

As for the huge increase in video stats – what a joke. Anyone notice how on most news video players the next video starts automatically ? Suddenly there’s two hits but in reality there was only one.

Unfortunately the so-called managers, producers and editors of these sites are all caught in this trap. Their masters expect improvement on these stats and so they play the little manipulation games to give them what they want to see. Not one of those senior execs are smart enough to really grasp what impact all this has on the quality of their product. But then most are just newspaper hacks dragged – very unwillingly – into the web so their understanding is shockingly limited and they don’t want to know about “dissenting” ideas. So long as they all play the same game they’re safe.

“as advertisers move to new media as their primary ad spend”

i don’t think ithe above will happen (ie digital as primary ad spend) with the current lack of measurement clarity and apparent complacency around fixing it. We’ve had the same issues for how long now? 5 years? Good to see the main players working towards a solution …

I guess it’s low on the priority list when YOY revenue is growing at 25%+ without real metrics.

Decent advertisers will have their own metrics in place to judge incoming links against campaign spends.

Metrics online are certainly far superior to radio & TV. I personally know of one organisation with extensive TV ad campaigns that has absolutely no idea how effective they are.

they do smithee but incoming links is only 1 part of the equation. context, exposure, reach, frequency are all important elements and these can’t be measured by incoming link attribution.

All of these will increasingly count for nothing as the number of marketers grow that can link their marketing investment by channel to a sales outcome.

All media metrics, reach, frequency, UBs, PIs, CPM etc etc etc are nothing more than middle-metrics that exist only because of a historic lack of clear links between what marketers put in (money) and what they get out (sales).

It is no wonder that marketers in Australia continue to struggle to gain a solid presence in the boardroom because of this.

Lets not forget all those ‘random stumblers’ that these fakes claim to be legitimate browsers
@ Ben – we all know that these days context is no way an indicator of the level of link attribution, theres too much crap, being read by too many ignorant viewers – exposure and reach on the other hand are important as you have pointed out.
I have an easy solution to all this, lets just ignore ratings and figures released by 3rd party affiliates because we all know its propaganda based bullshit.

One stat many of these sites don’t want to mention is ‘average time on site’. While this stat can be effected by many other variables, I do know that at least one very popular news site has suffered a huge decline in “average time on site”.

It has dropped from more than 10 minutes to just over one minute. That can’t be good.

The funny side of this is that in a recent meeting the drop from 10 to one wasn’t mentioned, but the fact that the “average reader only stays for a minute” WAS brought up several times to prove the wisdom of several other mooted strategies.

I find this is very common. Drops that might reasonably be attributed to poor design or other Editorial factors are instead just explained away as “that’s how readers are”. Further Editorial decisions are then based on that “fact”. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.

I’ve seen more than one web editor desperately chasing their tale like this, yet be convinced they have an amazing talent of giving readers exactly what they want.

Isn’t the real question about value to advertisers, conversion and monetization for publishers? In the USA almost 50% of all inventory is now sold on a performance basis & CPM’s have correspondingly dropped by circa 75%. I’m not sure what relevance old world metrics have in value based media.

The future is going to be dominated by biddable media exchanges, change is on its way to Australia!

Media should be sold on its ability to sell an advertiser’s goods rather than who has the biggest buzz metric of the moment. The biggest issue and the one that most people seem to be blind to is that what media owners are selling and what advertisers are buying are 2 different things. Media owners need to understand this if they want to get away from cost-based arguments.
Performance and CPM are not the value based metrics that marketers need.

It might be of interest to all that Nic Cola, Fairfax Digital COO, has been appointed as the incoming Chairman for IAB Australia.
Call me old fashion, but isn’t that like asking the cannibals to make the gravy?
If the highest officer in one of the major site providers is there to make the rules and guide the industry, then we are all stuffed.

Does anyone think the problems with the existing metrics and their ability to be skewed by publishers will be solved with the introduction of the new web auditing system from the Audit Bureaux of Australia (backed by the IAB, MFA? https://staging.mumbrella.com.au/print-audit-body-launches-web-push-6174

Isn’t it the job of an Audit Bureau to audit and report everyone on a level playing field? I can only assume the ABA are going to bring out some hardline policies to ensure that either everyone has the same refresh rate (or indeed no refresh) so they can be reported in the same way.

No way they could enforce anything about refresh rates, but they could at least offer a statement saying in effect that web publishers’ statements about page impressions and hits are worthless as they pursue misleading tactics to artifically inflate the figures.

That’s the same as the well known practice of newspapers dumping huge numbers of papers at various educational and other insitutions and then claiming these as paid circulation.

I’d like to see them set their own reporting standard based on unique browsers and other hard-to-fake stats, and discarding any visits under 20 seconds.

One question I have is this.

If I turn the channel over to the 6 o’clock news and watch it for 15 seconds do I count as a viewer?

Or if 3m people tune into the first 30 seconds of a show, then over the course of the next 10 mins 2m tune out … what would the audience be reported as?

As someone agency side clearer, more honest metrics would help. It’s not a good use of resource when you spent a fair chunk of your day checking up on false and/or misleading audience claims made by ‘partners’

yes…and yes..

Interesting thread here. I notice that UBs appears to be the most trusted metric because it is not as easy to “game”. I’d agree. Auto-refresh is a simple and quick way to increase PIs. However, UBs is a FAR from perfect metric due to cookie deletion (and other factors) – and yes UBs are inflated (for example, 45m UBs is a market with a population of 21.7m).

The bottom line is that while no audience measurement metrics are perfect, the online world is the most ‘gamable’ of them all. I’d go so far as to say that any server-side metrics are over-cooked, conversely any panel based metrics are under-cooked. The reality lies somewhere in between which is why the MFA is hard at work with the IAB to develop a hybrid system that utilises the traffic from server-side data and the usage data from panel-side data. It’s hard yakka, but we are making progress.

Ben, re your questions on the TV example:
– If you watched the 6pm news for 15 seconds you are NOT a viewer. TV works on minute-by-minute data assigning the viewer to the channel being viewed at the middle of the minute (the 29th second I believe).
– If you watched just 1 minute of the 30 minute news you count as 1/30th of a viewer to the average audience for the news (but you are still reached and count to the cume).
– In your second example, the average audience (assuming it was a 10-minute show) would be the average of the audiences of all 10 minutes. That is, minute 1 would be the 3m, minute 10 would be the 1m. If the show lost audience at a constant rate (200k a minute), you would aggregate 3.0m+2.8m+2.6m+2.4m+2.2m+2.0m+1.8m+1.6m+1.4m+1.2m+1.0m up to 22m and then divide by the 11 minutes (hey – I goofed and used 11 minutes but the principle still applies) you would get an average audience of 22/11 = 2.0m (which is what you would expect). If it was a “cliff effect” and all 2m tuned out in the second minute then you would have 3.0 + 10*(1.0) = 13.0/11 = 1.182m as the average audience. In both these examples you would still have the same peak audience of 3m.

Hope that clears that up.

thanks John – much appreciated 🙂

@Chris Walton. That may be a worthy goal for advertisers, but explain the logic from a publishers point of view who has to suffer the almost insurmountable problem of providing ever greater screenspace to a ‘Brand’ (who claims no value in that screenspace unless it is clicked) and is incapable of both;
a. implementing genuine usability in the banner space
b. seeing past the near useless commodity banner and instead opting for a mechanism that works.

If you want pay-for-performance with me, I’m going to dictate all aspects of usability including the mechanism, art, position, fontsize sign-up/transaction process etc etc.

Whilst advertisers thrust upon us publishers their dumb-ass expanding banners that bite visitors – I’m charging CPM.