ONLINE-ADS>> Story on web site traffic ratings

Cliff Kurtzman (cliff_at_tenagra.com)
Mon, 20 Apr 1998 09:11:57 -0500 (CDT)

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There is a good story by Kate Maddox in Ad Age about how terribly flawed
the web site ratings services are, and what it means to those sites that
are misrepresented in them. See:

Web ratings lists make or break some ad deals
http://adage.com/interactive/articles/19980413/article1.html

The story details a case where RelevantKnowledge estimated 820,000 unique
visitors for Deja News during February, but Deja News measured 4.2 million
unique visitors on their site. As a result of being misrepresented as
lower in the ratings, Deja News had trouble closing an ad sale.

John Nardone of Modem Media is quoted as saying about the ratings services
that "I don't think any of them are any good. They're all systematically
deficient in one way or another."

The two comments I'd make based on this story, as well as my previous
impressions of such services:

#1) If a ratings system has an error range of 400%, it is essentially
putting out results with little validity. A random number generator can do
that too. Use with caution.

#2) Even if the ratings were accurate, I still don't understand why a media
buyer would care where a site sits in the rankings when considering a media
buy. If the site reaches the audience a media buyer wants to reach and can
offer at a competitive price the number of impressions the buyer wants to
buy in the desired time frame, then I can't see how the site ranking or
total inventory available would matter terribly much to the media buyer,
except perhaps in extreme cases where the buy approaches a significant
percentage of the available inventory.

--Cliff

Clifford Kurtzman
The Tenagra Corporation
http://www.tenagra.com/
281/480-6300

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