Smart Company:
Websites with niche appeal or smaller audiences could drop off the radar under a new standard methodology for measuring online advertising currently being considered.
A cross-industry committee established by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia, which represents mainly big online content providers such as Fairfax Digital and News Ltd, yesterday announced that it believes a panel-based methodology should become the industry standard for measuring online audiences.
A panel-based system will measure online audiences on a similar basis to that currently used to measure television audiences. Online metric companies will assemble panels of many thousands of internet users that are representative of the wider population and download software on their computers that records which websites they visit.
Metrics companies will then extrapolate the data they get from the software on the panel members’ computers to come up with monthly audience figures for particular websites.
But while this method is preferred by big web publishers and advertisers, because it provides more accurate information about visitor numbers, it tends to under-represent the audiences of websites with smaller, more specialised audiences. Read more.
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