This post is way overdue - I should have published this post a month ago instead a keeping it as a draft for so long. However, I just read a post from Peter Daboll, Yahoo’s Chief of Insights about the end of page views, and it reminded me of this luncheon.
I assisted the Media Research Council of LA’s Internet Research Panel luncheon at the Bel Age Hotel in West Hollywood on November 15th. The title was “Internet Research Panel: new developments in online measurement and research”.
Panelist included Tim Twichell, Senior Director, Research at Yahoo! Media Group, Pete Doe, VP Analytics & Modeling, at Nielsen Media Research, Erin Hunter, Executive Vice President at Comscore Networks, Inc. and Barbara Duker from Disney Online. Unfortunately, Bill Tancer, General Manager-Global Research at Hitwise was not present although he was scheduled (I am a regular reader of his blog and would have loved to meet him in person). Barbara Smith, SVP, Research Director at Palisades MediaGroup was the Moderator.
The first part of the discussion was about audience measurement and how Comscore and Nielsen are trying to give online advertisers the same tools as TV advertisers as more and more marketing dollars are transferred from TV to online advertising. Media buyers want GRPs, so that’s what Nielsen and Comscore are trying to provide. Deep inside me, I have the feeling that the Internet is a much richer and more complex and measurable medium than TV, so I am skeptical that a common measure unit can be found. A couple of web properties (namely Google and Yahoo) may find a common denominator, but I find the concept of reach almost irrelevant for the Web as a medium of niches and influence.
The second part of the presentation was about how Internet companies use market research in several ways: profile an audience beyond the traffic metrics provided by web analytics tools, qualify the audience beyond traditional demographics, prove the effectiveness of advertising beyond direct response (publishers like Yahoo or Disney want to show how online advertising on their site is also about branding), survey users and visitors about new sites and new redesigns.
Tim Twichell also explained how page views are increasingly becoming a metric of the past. He gave the example of the redesign of Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Maps. While visitors praise the new Ajax-based design, the number of page views significantly dropped. It is time for a new metric, but what? Last month, no one had the answer to that question…
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