Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Why is it so hard to find a valid yardstick for measuring Web traffic?
Feb 5, 1999 | When Yahoo bought GeoCities last week in a stock swap valued at $3.5 billion or so (depending on when you checked the companies' gyrating stock prices), one big force driving the deal was Yahoo's yen to top "the ratings." Yes, like its idiot-box forebear, the Web now has ratings -- and most often today, Web ratings means Media Metrix's monthly "reach" stats.
Thus Yahoo's press release boasted, "With the addition of GeoCities to the Yahoo! network, the companies expect their combined unduplicated home/work reach to exceed 58 percent, which would make it the second largest network of properties on the Web." (AOL/Netscape is No. 1.) News reports dutifully repeated this claim.
But what is this thing called reach? It's a measure of the percentage of the Web-surfing population who alight on a company's pages at least once in a given time period (usually a month). There are all sorts of questions and problems surrounding reach, and the specifics of Media Metrix's approach to measuring Web traffic. But that hasn't stopped the media and industry analysts from beginning to adopt it as a standard.
Of course, in the novel, hype-driven world of Web publishing, we need standards. Vast sums of money -- both stock-generated "play money" and real cash -- are changing hands based on perceptions of how much traffic sites are garnering. So it's no wonder people have begun to grab the nearest yardstick, however bent it may be.
Still, to judge the success of Web businesses by reach is to continue to view the Web by standards more suited to TV or radio. Not only is it strategically unwise for businesspeople and investors; it also risks crippling the still-nascent Web by creating incentives for site operators to favor one-time visitors and stray traffic over loyal customers.
To understand why, let's review the history of Web traffic measurement from the medium's genesis.
In the beginning was the hit. And the hit was with the server, and the hit was ... whatever you wanted it to be.
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