Web Publishers to Face New Traffic Counting Rules

Interactive Advertising Bureau Pushes Rules for Publishers

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 12/20/2005 | 10:47 PM ]

The success of a web-site is usually measured by the number of visitors and page views, which makes it more or less appealing for advertisers. Unfortunately, the amount of visitors and viewed pages can be easily boosted by publishers by simply using different ways of counting. However, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is seeking to adopt a stricter set of rules to measure traffic on web-sites.

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CNET News.com brings an example of sport news web-site ESPN.com that attracts an estimated 15 million unique visitors a month, according to the audience-metric firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Included in its traffic are an estimated 1.2 million unique visitors from content partner Active.com, an activity event site that displays a small logo from ESPN.com at the top right-hand corner of its pages. Some other web-sites are also reportedly counting traffic from their co-branding web-sites and even traffic on the web-sites they submit content to.

“The measurement companies have had different hierarchies, and each partner site was able to roll up traffic in different ways, causing great consternation around the industry,” said Leo Scullin, an IAB vice president who is driving the initiative.

The new rules from IAB are designed to end all of the aforementioned practices and force publishers to “play fair”.

The project organizers hope the changes, which are not yet finalized and should go into effect in the middle of next year, will help Web publishers and their advertisers get a better understanding of how many people are visiting which sites, and how often, according to the news-story.

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