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On Monday, Barry Ritholtz sounded the alarm at The Big Picture:
Soon to be worthless: Nielsen Net Ratings and comScore Media Metrix
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"All traffic to your blog will then be assigned as traffic to __."
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I have now seen this or similar demands from 3 separate mainstream media outlets: A wire service (Reuters), a financial magazine, and a major newspaper. In all three examples that I reviewed, the blog itself isn't transferred or sold to the media outlet
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Let's consider the ramifications:
1) This is nothing short of a naked grab to steal Blog traffic numbers, and artificially boost MSM web traffic numbers.
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2) Nielsen Net Ratings and comScore Media Metrix data are soon to be -- assuming they are not already -- worthless bull$h%t. If these ratings companies are complicit in this arrangement -- or if they even know and tolerate it -- their business model goes kaput. Since major MSMedia are attempting to buy ratings, these rating will no longer accurately measure true traffic.
My take:
As discussed yesterday when covering the Reuters invite, I think very few bloggers are in a position to turn their Nielsen or comScore data into cash. The advertisers who subscribe to these expensive services are looking for the sort of scale that a large site (or network of sites) can provide.
Every source for data on page views, visits, unique visitors, links, and time spent is flawed. But imperfect data is better than no data. While it's often useful to have specific data per site, if the ad is going to run across a whole network then that's the data that matters to the advertiser.
Valleywag often plays the role of breathless critic, but in this case Owen Thomas is a voice of reason:
At times, there's nothing more amusing than watching a blogger in the middle of a meltdown. Barry Ritholz, the CEO of stock-research firm Fusion IQ, has apparently been seized by panic over an interesting, but unthreatening, development: Big media companies getting into the business of selling ads for blogs. They've already built up an expensive ad sales force, and often find it difficult to grow traffic on their websites faster than their salespeople can sell it. A natural solution: Approach blogs covering similar topics and offer to sell ads on their sites, sharing the revenue.
Lots more details in Owen's post, including a comment by Barry.
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I don't buy that. It is easy enough to measure EXACTLY how many ads are actually being seen (served) or clicked on. So why go thru assignment/accounting of this? It seems like the MSM wants credit for the traffic without building or buying it.
As the recent post about Glam at Venturebeat shows, this aggregation/assignment approach is a recipe for inaccuracy and abuse.
I've never purchased a report from comScore or Nielsen but based on public data that I've seen, the reports have independent numbers for individual URLs (at least the big ones) and the network as a whole. e.g. Microsoft.com, MSN.com and live.com are credited to Microsoft but tracked separately. Perhaps that addresses your main concern?
Sure, ad measurement is easy but your proposal would have Reuters report more ads displayed than their (supposed) total traffic. I'm not sure that's an improvement.
And, they aren't stealing the traffic, they're paying for it. (30% of revenue may or may not be a good deal, but that's up to individual bloggers to decide.)
When you make such a strong set of accusations (much stronger than I quoted above), don't be surprised at getting lots of pushback.
In bond ratings, we have seen S&P, Moody's and Fitch give AAA rating to what turned out to be junk bonds.
In accounting, we saw Arthur Anderson and others say that Enron, Worldcom, etc. had accounting books that were fine, when they were garbage.
Now I see these Media Matrix/Nielsen "assignments."
Why give us qualitative descriptions of easily measurable data? Why should anyone assign traffic if the ostensible purpose is measuring ads?
What I am really complaining about the baseball equivalent of steroids: Instead of gaming the system with these traffic assignment clauses, why not merely reveal the actual traffic data? It just smells funny . . .