III. Measuring Online Media: A New Planning Paradigm

Third‐party research plays a critical role in the offline media ecosystem. As a measurement currency, information from monopoly ratings firms such as Nielsen and Arbitron guides media planning, governs media pricing, and is even used to assess the success of ad campaigns. However, audience measurement plays a substantially diminished role in advertising on the Internet. Two shifts help to account for the evolving role of media measurement online, and are explored below: the emergence of performance‐based pricing models, and the increasing reliance on new kinds of audience targeting.