Will an audience measurement currency take hold online?

A number of countervailing forces appear to be at work in the online media measurement today: on one hand, explicit standard‐setting efforts and the emergence of “hybrid” audience measures, and on the other, a growing diversity of measurement companies, media types, and technology platforms. Two points bear consideration. The first is that the most successful media measurement currencies have emerged not from industry task forces, but through market power, which is to say research monopolies. The single development which would do the most to clarify audience measurement standards would be a union of comScore and Nielsen NetRatings — an event which, given the high costs of maintaining competing panels and the obvious benefit of eliminating embarrassing discrepancies, is not out of the question. Combined with the assimilation of server‐side data via “hybrid” approaches, such a union would establish a single, industry‐wide standard for comparing online audiences. Alternatively, a server‐side measurement may take hold as an audience standard if (as TPM’s Karimkhany suggests) the industry is gradually coming to see panel measures as obsolete. In this scenario, the most likely candidate for a standard is Google Analytics, which is much cheaper and far more widespread than alternatives like Omniture, especially among blogs and smaller, independent Web sites. (Google also has the technical advantage of being able to calibrate online measurements using its own vast audience and huge advertising network.) The second point to consider is that even if a consensus emerges by either of these routes, the resulting standard will not automatically be a media “currency” in the way of Arbitron’s radio rankings or Nielsen’s TV ratings. Agreeing on a single estimate (however imperfect) of the number of people who read the Times online last month, or on whether the Times or the Post did better among high‐income women, will not stanch the flow of information about what Web users are doing and what they care about. It will not prevent either of those papers from touting other statistics which strengthen their case. And most important, it will not necessarily satisfy the needs of advertisers, who no longer have to plan their campaigns — nor pay for them — on the basis of static readership profiles. The following section will investigate how media metrics are used in planning and executing advertising campaigns, and how this affects publishers.