Nielsen to reissue news rankings after mistake sees Ninemsn fall to third
Media measurement company Nielsen has been forced into a embarrassing recalculation of its news website rankings, after it accidentally excluded a key Ninemsn subsite from its February online ratings.
The error, contained in the ratings provided to publishers earlier this week, saw Ninemsn drop from its long-held position at the top of the news ranking to third position behind smh.com.au and news.com.au.
“The issue is that within the Ninemsn news channel, in the current events and global news category, one of the sites — finance.ninemsn.com.au –was incorrectly excluded. We identified this in an investigation yesterday and we will restate those numbers to include the incorrectly excluded domain,” said Matt Bruce, Nielsen’s managing director for media audience measurement.
“Within each channel there are a number of different URLs that roll up to the channel and when some changes were made to those channel definitions this one was incorrectly left out.”
So why does ninemsn’s traffic figure include traffic to a collection of its news sites (as does the traffic figure for ABC and Yahoo) while everyone else shows traffic to individual sites or brands. Is this meant to be a Brand report or a Publisher report — because right now, it’s a combination of both……??
So Monty, isn’t that a bit like saying that in the TV ratings the Nine network can’t aggregate Gem and Go with their primary channel and Seven can’t do the same with 7Two and 7Mate, and Ten with ONE and ELEVEN? Think of it as a masthead number.