II. Measuring Online Media: Disputes About Data

The term “banner ad” was coined by the site Hotwired, which standardized the novel advertising format and began selling it on a wide basis in late 1994. (By most accounts AT&T was first to try the format, with a come‐on that read, “Have you ever clicked here? You will.”) Almost immediately Hotwired took the logical next step and began to report on “click‐through rates” to its advertisers, giving them a new way to assess the success of their campaigns. From its earliest days, the nascent online advertising industry was taken to herald a revolution, offering a precision and depth of information unmatched by any other advertising platform. The Internet was touted as the first truly “accountable” medium. A new class of consultants and agencies sprang into being to develop a vocabulary of techniques to exploit the medium’s capabilities. And yet, the reigning perception online is one of chaos and confusion. The industry cannot agree even on basic conceptual definitions, such as what constitutes a “unique visitor.” In the world of online news, individual publishers routinely negotiate a number of basic audience metrics which are not only mutually incompatible, but also vary wildly from month to month. Publishers seem to agree that much of the available data are unreliable, but disagree about precisely which. Reconciling these two basic features of the online measurement world — abundant information and persistent confusion — is the key to understanding this world and how it is likely to develop. The chaos of audience information online does not represent the failure of the Internet’s promise as an advertising medium, but rather its realization. Information abundance is chaotic.