Friday, July 25, 2008

There's the truth ... and there's the truth

The Oz has an expose about websites stretching the truth about traffic numbers.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24068103-26077,00.html

Overall not bad, and an issue that is something of concern.

A few interesting points however ...

"Simon Van Wyck, founder of web advertising company Hothouse, says a number of web publishers and portals count visitors to allied sites, but do not necessarily have the right to claim such traffic.

"I think you can look at other things, such as claiming traffic that is not theirs," Van Wyck says.
Examples include Ninemsn, which claims Hotmail and Yahoo. "

Hrm ... ninemsn claims Yahoo! traffic. Might want a fact check on that one.

"Recently the Internet Advertising Bureau began looking at the issue of automatic refreshes of pages -- a common element used by news publishers to keep late-breaking stories at the top of lists.

"Keegan says the problem occurs when ads are refreshed along with the stories, creating the impression of more traffic."

Most publishers do this ...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nielsen keeps a very strict eye on the major publishers and have already thought about the JavaScript issue.

As with Hotmail (ninemsn) and MySpace (News Ltd) etc, they have to report with and without those sites.

The real faked numbers are non-digital especially radio.