Oprano Adult Industry Forums - How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting

I thought this was a pretty interesting article from yesterday's New York Times.

It talks about online advertising dollars getting held back because of discrepancies in stats reporting between the publishers and third party trackers.

I think they need someone from the adult industry to give them some advice.

Quote:

How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month? Was it 421,000, or, more optimistically, 497,000? Or was the real number more than three times higher, perhaps 1.8 million?

The answer — which may be any, or none, of the above — is a critical one for Condé Nast, which owns the site, and for companies like Ralph Lauren, which pay to advertise there. Condé Nast’s internal count (1.8 million) was much higher than the tally by ComScore (421,000) or Nielsen/NetRatings (497,000), whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates, and the discrepancies have created a good deal of friction.

Other big media companies — including Time Warner, The Financial Times and The New York Times — are equally frustrated that their counts of Web visitors keep coming in vastly higher than those of the tracking companies. There are many reasons for the differences (such as how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted), but the upshot is the same: the growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.

“You’re hearing measurement as one of the reasons that buyers are not moving even more money online,” said Wenda Harris Millard, president for media at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and, until June, chief sales officer at Yahoo. “It’s hugely frustrating. It’s one of the barriers preventing us from really moving forward.”

... further on in the article ...

Quote:

A main source of the discrepancies is over how to measure Internet use in the workplace. Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore both track the Web use of representative panels of people, and use those traffic patterns to extrapolate the total number of visitors to a Web site. But online publishers say that their systems drastically undercount people who use the Web during work hours, particularly in offices where corporate software makes the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems .

That's a huge problem because my experience over 6 years and over many different niches of adult and mainstream shows that most of the traffic comes during normal business hours.

... further on in the article ...

Quote:

The ratings company say they have improved their panels, and point fingers back at the Web publishers, accusing them of mixing international and domestic traffic and of double-counting people who visit a site from home and from the office.

To make matters more complicated, consumers who delete cookies — small bits of computer code that track their online wanderings — are also overcounted by publishers’ servers, by most accounts. ComScore pointed to cookie deletion as the source of the difference between its figures for Style.com and Conde Nast's figures. Some news sites have tried to improve their systems by asking their visitors to register, but many people refuse.

Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/te...html?th&emc=th

As I said, I think they need someone from the adult industry to give them some advice.