by Lisa Napoli (New York Times)
 
 
 
 
 
 

[I] n press releases touting traffic to news sites on
the Web last week, more than record numbers met the
eyes. There was a jumble of data, too.

On the day after President Clinton's address on the
Monica Lewinsky matter, for example, several of the most frequently visited Web sites reported numbers that
brought into focus the difficulty of measuring -- and
comparing -- Internet traffic.

ABCnews.com said its Web site received 1.6 million
"visits" last Monday, while CNN reported 20.4 million
"page impressions." Meanwhile, MSNBC said its Web site had 1.13 million "unique visitors."

Later in the week, Relevant ------------------
Knowledge, a third-party Internet Related Article
measurement service, released its 
figures, which reported over 3.5 
million unique visitors to 11 
different news sites, including those 
listed above, last Monday and ------------------
Tuesday.

What do all those disparate numbers and qualifiers add
up to?

"The measurement conundrum in a bottle," said Rich
LeFurgy, president of the Internet Advertising Bureau, a
trade group formed in part to promote standards in
Internet advertising. "Basically you have different
sites telling you different metrics that are not being
confirmed by the measurement companies."

Most Web sites collect traffic data from their own
server logs, allowing them to monitor how many different people visited the site during a given period (referred
to as "unique visitors"), how many times those
individuals returned (known as "visits"), and the total
number of pages those visitors looked at on the site
(commonly described as "page views" or "page
impressions").

In addition to the Web publishers' own numbers, there
are several independent companies, like Relevant
Knowledge and Media Metrix, that measure Internet
traffic. In general, these third-party services report
traffic in terms of visitors, but even when they use the
same unit of measurement, their numbers often differ
from the figures reported by Web publishers themselves.
Part of the reason for the difference can be attributed
to the way these services gather their data.

Most independent measurement services monitor the
surfing habits of a "representative sampling" of online
users, similar to the way the Nielsen rating service
measures television audiences. These companies provide
their sample users with proprietary software that tracks
their Internet use, then use the data gathered to
project overall Web traffic.

However, Web publishers often criticize these ratings
services as failing to accurately track important
segments of the Internet audience, including
international users and those who surf the Web at work.

"It would be like Nielsen only looking at the workplace
and saying no one really looks at Seinfeld," said Mark
Bernstein, vice president and general manager of CNN
Interactive.

Making matters more complicated -- for both publishers
and measurement services -- is the issue of proxy
caching, a method by which some Internet service
providers store pages of frequently visited Web sites.
Caching speeds download times and alleviates
bottlenecks, but it can also interfere with traffic
measurement. If an ISP has cached a Web page seen by one user, the next user at the same ISP won't be counted by
many measurement systems.

All of this translates into confusion for anyone trying
to determine the breadth and depth of the Net audience.
Largely, that means Web publishers, and the advertisers
they are trying to attract.

"However you cut it, there's not a lot of accuracy in
the numbers. When a potential buyer of media tries to
compare, and those numbers don't make sense, it's hard
for the media company," said LeFurgy, of the Internet
Advertising Bureau. "Say there's an ad agency that wants
to make an online media buy. The sites go nuts if [the
agencies] go to measurement companies because they don't believe the numbers are accurate compared to the
[publisher's own] server data."

Publishers agree that some sort of standardization is
necessary. Jim Kinsella, general manager of MSNBC on the Internet, said he understands the frustration of
potential advertisers who are presented with disparate
methods of traffic measurement. "I personally know
they're frustrated. It's totally confusing. We've got to
get our act together, got to stop the silliness."

But that means Web publishers would have to agree on how to represent their traffic -- and some say that will be
a challenge.

For instance, MSNBC is committed to reporting unique
visitors, Kinsella said. CNN, on the other hand, would
rather represent its traffic in terms of page views.
Each ardently prefers its own system -- and criticizes
the other for using a different method.
the other for using a different method.

 "The fact that someone comes
to our site and reads 10
pages shouldn't be
dismissed," said Bernstein,
 of CNN Interactive, who is
also critical of the
 measurement services for
MSNBC on the their emphasis on visitors
Internet (as opposed to page views).
 "I don't object to using
Relevant Knowledge and Media
Metrix," he said. "But I do take issue with the
utilization of those numbers as a correct reflection of
our audience."

For their part, the measurement companies say the data
supplied by the Web publishers has serious limitations
as well, because it doesn't provide demographic and
psychographic details about the people surfing. They
also acknowledge that their own competing methodologies don't make things any less confusing.

But Mary Ann Packo, president of Media Metrix,
attributes part of the problem to the newness of the
medium, noting that it took "10 to 15 years" for media
measurement to evolve for television.

"The great news is there's tremendous information
available. There's so much opportunity for this medium
-- it's not just a frequency and reach medium, it can be
direct response," she said, referring to the two factors
commonly used to measure advertising's effectiveness.
"Because it [the Internet] is so measurable we can
collect so much more information than NBC would ever
have about its TV lineup, and the way people interact
with its lineup."

Chris Charron, an analyst with Forrester Research,
agrees that Internet traffic measurement ultimately has
to go beyond the standards used to measure advertising
in other media.

"Reach matters to content providers and to advertisers,
but the definition of reach is bursting at the seams
with the Interent," he said. "We need to shift from
measuring pure viewership, and put more emphasis on
measuring response and attention and frequency of focus.
That's a better signal of how compelling content is and
it's also a better signal for advertisers to judge how
loyal, how active is the consumer. These are things we
really need to get at -- not just do they have the
computer turned on."

The fact that Internet traffic measurement is in the
early stages of development is probably the one factor
that everyone agrees on. "We have to start somewhere and work toward the height of accuracy," said Mark Bernstein
of CNN Interactive. "I don't think there's going to be a
simple solution for the next year or two."

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* ABCnews.com

* CNN

* MSNBC

* Relevant Knowledge

* Internet Advertising Bureau

* Media Metrix

* Forrester Research

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Lisa Napoli at napoli@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.
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Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company