How many hits do you get on your site? It depends on who counts.
Take a real example, featured last week in the New York Times: Style.com. Site’s proprietor Condé Nast had an internal count on September of 1,8 million visitors. Tracking company ComScore said it was 421,000, and Nielsen/NetRatings counted 497,000.
It’s a big room for discrepancy, and web companies are frustrated, because due to the frictions, the growth of online advertising is being stunted. Measurement is one of the reasons that buyers are not moving even more money online.
Online advertising is expected to generate more than $20 billion in revenue in 2007, more than double the $9.6 billion it represented in 2004.
Raw server data show precise numbers of site visits and page views, but this data does not correlate directly to the number of visitors. For example, there is a big discrepancy of how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted. In offices corporate software make the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems, and companies like Nielsen and ComScore tend to undercount people.
Both companies use panels, but also here there are complaints and discrepancies, especially when dealing whit group representations. Panels are a less accurate system than the Internet.
In the meantime, the ratings companies accuse Web publishers of mixing international and domestic traffic and of double-counting people who visit a site from home and from the office. In addition, consumers who delete cookies are also overcounted by servers.
Another problem lays on how some organizations are allowed to include groups of sites as a single entry for rating purposes. For example CNN’s outside rating includes the sites CNNMoney, Fortune, Time, CNN, Sports Illustrated and Golf.
And to make matters worst, advertisers are concerned about how often their ads appear.
Microsoft will buy a stake in Facebook, valuing this company at $15 billion
Microsoft is taking a 1.6 percent stake for $240 million in Facebook during its next round of financing, valuing the company at $15 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party advertising partner for the social-networking space. Doing so, Microsoft has won a high-profile technology industry battle with Google and Yahoo.
Facebook, headquartered in Palo Alto, is a three and a half years old and will bring in about $150 million in revenue this year.
Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old Facebook founder who followed the path of Bill Gates by dropping out of Harvard to build a company, owns a 20 percent share that may now be worth as much as $3 billion. Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that invested $12.7 million in May 2005, now holds stock that could be worth $1.65 billion.
TV networks give their perspectives on broadband video
The major U.S. TV broadcast networks are embracing online video like never before. They are struggling to figure out the best way of attracting viewers online. Forbes.com wrote a good report that contained interviews with top executives at NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox.
