Comscore and Federated Media (which sells some ads on this blog) have teamed up to try to improve measurement in the long tail of social and niche media online. And that’s good.
Except I argue that the panel means of measurement is doomed to miserable failure in the mass of niches. You cannot possible build a panel large and varied enough to get reliable measurement of the audience and traffic of millions — even thousands — of sites, especially when we get the means to tie together lots of those small sites into networks.
What I hope they do is honestly and harshly look at their stats from their panel versus the server stats of the sites — especially the smaller sites, not the much-easier-to-measure big boys like Digg and BoingBoing — and realize that the panel just doesn’t work.
What we need, I’ve long argued, is standard metrics reported from the sites’ servers or from snoopers on pages and verified by a service such as Comscore or Nielsen. Old methods will not work in this new world. The same goes for Nielsen, which is buying the rest of Netratings.
And whilel we’re at it, let’s figure out the new measurements that capture the unique value of this new medium: authority, speed, connectedness… The page view is dead.
I think it’s time for a measurement summit: Bring together the measurement companies, the advertisers and their agencies (buyers), the sites’ reps (sellers), the media sites, and technology companies and let’s hammer out some standards and methods for measurement. This will only work if we have open standards with analytics (like Comscore and Nielsen) building value atop that common data. Otherwise, we end up in a world that will continue to confuse and scare advertisers — and their money — away.
