'NYT' Explores Problem of Conflcting Counts of Web Traffic

By: E&P Staff With the need to grow online revenue now paramount for most print products, the question of Web traffic rises in importance all the time.

The continuing problem of how to count hits, and why they differ so greatly from one system to another, has drawn frequent coverage by E&P in the past two years. On Monday, The New York Times presents a lengthy article on the subject by Louise Story.

An excerpt follows. The entire piece is at www.nytimes.com.
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?You?re hearing measurement as one of the reasons that buyers are not moving even more money online,? said Wenda Harris Millard, president for media at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and, until June, chief sales officer at Yahoo. ?It?s hugely frustrating. It?s one of the barriers preventing us from really moving forward.?

Online advertising is expected to generate more than $20 billion in revenue this year, more than double the $9.6 billion it represented as recently as 2004. Nobody doubts that the figure will grow ? particularly as advertisers hone their techniques for aiming messages to particular consumers ? but the question remains how much the clashing traffic figures will hold the market back.

?This is a bit of an anomaly because this disagreement doesn?t happen offline,? said Jim Spanfeller, president and chief executive of Forbes.com. By his calculation, Forbes.com had 11.6 million United States visitors last month, far more than the 7.5 million estimated by Nielsen/NetRatings and 5.8 million from ComScore...

A main source of the discrepancies is over how to measure Internet use in the workplace. Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore both track the Web use of representative panels of people, and use those traffic patterns to extrapolate the total number of visitors to a Web site. But online publishers say that their systems drastically undercount people who use the Web during work hours, particularly in offices where corporate software makes the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems.