NEWSPAPERS STRUGGLE WITH ONLINE AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT

By: Martha L. Stone Ratings Groups Give Mixed Report Card; Task Force Formed



In the last year, several newspaper Web sites have become the top news
and information sources for their regions, while others have fallen
behind non-newspaper competitors. This decidedly mixed report card for
the nation's largest dailies draws the ire of many publishers who say
their own server logs tell a different story - leading an industry task
force to look into the whole issue of audience measurement.



In an analysis for E&P
Online, Media Metrix of New York ranked news and information sites
for nine of the nation's largest markets, comparing the first quarter
of 2000 with the same period for 1999. America Online and major portals
like Yahoo! were not included in the rankings because their local
information typically isn't as deep as newspapers and city guides.



After ranking behind a handful of competitors last year, latimes.com
has become the leading news/information site in Los Angeles. But in
Chicago, chicagotribune.com lost the No. 1 spot to competitors like
MSNBC.com and CitySearch-Ticketmaster.



AccessAtlanta.com (affiliated with the Atlanta Journal-

Constitution), The Boston Globe's boston.com, and
washingtonpost.com held onto the No. 1 positions in their markets,
while newspapers lost online market share in Philadelphia and Seattle.
In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, dallasnews.com jumped way ahead of Star-

Telegram.com, which last year enjoyed a slightly larger online audience
than The Dallas Morning News site.



Newspapers say they're undercounted



Newspaper executives criticize these statistics and similar numbers
gathered by Media Metrix competitor Nielsen//NetRatings, also of New
York, saying they reach larger audiences than these figures show. In
response, the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) of Vienna, Va.,
has formed a task force to address the concerns.



Media Metrix and Nielsen//NetRatings, the two most popular panel-based
Web trackers, are criticized for not having large-enough panels to
accurately reflect the Web's at-work audience, from which many news
sites draw the most visitors.



'Panel-based research by itself is a time honored and well-proven
research methodology,' says Lincoln Millstein, outgoing president of
the NAA's New Media Federation, and executive vice president of New
York Times Digital. 'That said, the execution of that methodology,
[and] the quality and the size of the panel are extremely important.'



Millstein says that sample sizes are much too small to measure traffic
at small- and medium-sized news sites. 'When you have small samples,
the numbers can diverge quite wildly,' he says.



Doug McFarland, senior vice president and general manager of Media
Metrix defends the five-year-old company, saying it constantly
addresses the concerns of Web sites as it grows. 'In terms of
methodology, there are constant improvements and changes,' McFarland
says. Both Media Metrix and Nielsen//NetRatings are working to improve
local audience measurement, and Nielsen just announced an increase in
its panel size.



Other Internet traffic counters, such as @Plan, Media Audit, NFO
Impact, and Scarborough, count local news sites with as much as three
times the reach shown in Media Metrix's sample, Millstein says. Some of
these firms have much larger sample sizes, which accounts for more
success in metering the Web traffic more accurately, Millstein
believes.



'Why does it matter?' he asks. 'Because if you put my reach at under
10% in my marketplace, I have a problem being a viable medium in my
marketplace.' If some of these local sites actually reach 30% or more
of their markets, that puts online audiences closer to the reach of
print newspapers in many markets. But Media Metrix numbers don't
currently show any newspaper sites with such stellar numbers.



Sally Blodgett, a spokesperson for NetRatings Inc. in Milpitas, Calif.,
says the company recently partnered with New York's Scarborough
Research to use its larger panels of local audiences. The NetRatings-

Scarborough partnership will provide 'richer' local statistics,
Blodgett says. (Nielsen Media Research, which teams with NetRatings
Inc. to provide this service, is a unit of VNU USA Inc., the parent
company of both Editor & Publisher and Scarborough.)



Debating 'reach'



Millstein adds that the definition for 'reach' works against news
sites. The standard for counting reach numbers is based on a monthly
number, but one of the most redeeming factors about news sites is their
ability to attract users many times per week, or even on a daily basis.
'Yahoo! and AOL are always Nos. 1 and 2,' Millstein says. 'It should
not be a surprise to anyone that users visit AOL and Yahoo! once or
twice a month.'



Panel-based researchers like Media Metrix also don't count domain
extensions like .edu, .mil, and .gov. The second highest domain sending
visitors to boston.com is Harvard.edu, but those visitors aren't
counted, Millstein says.



Another problem is that international audiences aren't counted, but
some American newspapers report significant traffic from Web surfers
around the globe. Media Metrix says it will soon include overseas
traffic.



Is an audit the solution?



Consisting of top executives from major media companies' Web divisions,
the NAA task force is considering creating its own audit of newspaper
site server logs that could be provided to advertisers. Among the
options being considered is the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) of
Schaumburg, Ill. ABC audits virtually every print newspaper in the
U.S., but only seven newspaper Web sites are audited by its new-media
unit, ABCi. By providing true audits, ABCi can become the standard unit
of measurement across all sites, says Mark A. Wachowicz, senior vice
president, sales and marketing. But so far, newspapers have been
reluctant to invite ABC into another area of their business. In the
meantime, ABCi is providing audits to major dot coms like Yahoo!,
Lycos, and iVillage.



Until a true industry standard is developed, these local traffic
rankings are all that many media buyers have to go on when choosing
places to advertise. Sites that do well in the rankings are, not
surprisingly, happy with the numbers.



'We keep a pretty close eye on Media Metrix, Nielsen//NetRatings, and
MediaAudit,' says Steve Yelvington, director of network content at Cox
Interactive Media in Atlanta. The company's AccessAtlanta is No. 1 in
its market, according to both Media Metrix and NetRatings. 'They're one
type of resource that we use to measure our success. We're happy that
in most of our markets the numbers look very favorable, and when they
don't, we do what we can to understand why.'


Merrill Brown, editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com, the No. 1 news site
nationally, recognizes the flawed system, despite being on the right
side of the statistics. 'I love Media Metrix,' he says. 'I think
they're great numbers.'



Playfulness aside, Brown acknowledges that these firms have a hard time
pinning down international visitors and at-work users. 'The Internet
knows no boundaries,' Brown says. 'If you're not tracking the world,
you're missing the boat. It's as easy to see BBC as it is
washingtonpost.com.' Brown says MSNBC.com draws about 10% to 15% of its
audience from outside the U.S.



Many in the newspaper business are calling for accountability. 'As
we've seen in the stock market, accountability is coming here, too,'
says Chris Feola, chief of technology at Belo Interactive in Dallas and
a member of the NAA task force. 'The task force is a good first step.'