I. Fractured Media Metrics: The Lack of an Online “Currency”

A striking contradiction exists at the center of the confusing world of Internet metrics: What is by all accounts the most precisely measurable medium in history, in which every act of reading, watching or listening is a discrete, recorded event, is beset by a frightening tangle of incompatible standards for gauging traffic. Every new medium has endured a period of statistical upheaval. Without exception, though, major ad‐supported media platforms — newspapers, magazines, TV networks, radio stations —have settled on one dominant, third‐party standard for counting audiences. In contrast, the online landscape today is, if anything, more fractured and confusing than in the Internetʹs earliest days as a popular medium, still characterized by basic disagreements over not just how but what to measure. This cacophony persists despite the clear maturation of the online advertising industry, which according to Forrester Research will claim $29 billion in the United States in 2010, or 13 percent of total ad spending (though search‐engine marketing accounts for more than half of the online share). Among online news outlets of various stripes, the perception of a chaos of competing metrics seems to be universal. This is a troubling issue for these publishers, editors, and reporters. As they seek to perform powerful journalism with a wide impact, they are befuddled by contradictory data sets that fail to capture how their stories are being distributed or read, and what sort of impact they are having on their audience or on the institutions they cover. Furthermore, as they seek to build sustainable business models in the online economy, they have a hard time finding the reliable, consistent data that allow other industries to grow and thrive. Several industry groups, representing publishers as well as advertisers and the measurement firms themselves, have launched initiatives that aim to bring clarity and consensus to the online measurement landscape. To understand what online news ventures can or even should hope for in such efforts, and what kind of contribution the Tow Center can make, requires first understanding why a measurement currency has not emerged online and whether one is likely to. The key question, in other words, is whether the continuing disagreement over online measurement standards on the Internet is evidence of a young medium, or of a fundamentally different one. Will an agreed‐upon currency emerge for counting audiences on the Internet? Why hasnʹt one taken hold thus far? Answering these questions begins with a closer look at measurement currencies in traditional media.