Scandal Brewing over Highly Inflated Traffic Numbers of some Web Sites

[mandy]

From TechDirt:

In the last few months, we've seen a number of sites claiming traffic numbers that are unlikely to be realistic, but which the press is often passing on as if they were fact. A few reporters have picked up on this,...

...with the recent rise in ad or sponsorship deals based on time (such as "be our sponsor for a month"), it could raise some problems. With all the fuss about how online media is back thanks to advertising, it's worth remembering that the ad market is cyclical, and a big scandal over highly inflated traffic numbers could torpedo the ad sales of some sites pretty quickly...

full article: http://techdirt.com/articles/20060829/020009.shtml

The NYT reports on Forbes.com's allegedly suspect traffic claims:

Forbes’s Web prowess is a big reason Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that counts Bono of U2 as a managing director, agreed on Aug. 4 to buy a minority stake in Forbes’s publishing business. “Forbes has already won the first round” in the battle for Internet supremacy, an Elevation founder, Roger McNamee, said then.

But a closer look at the numbers raises questions about Forbes.com’s industry-leading success. For its claim of a worldwide audience of nearly 15.3 million, it has been citing February data from comScore Media Metrix, one of the two leading providers of third-party Web traffic data.

There are several problems with that statistic, though, and comScore has since revised the figure downward to less than 13.2 million as part of a broader revamping of its worldwide data for many sites...

There is also the question, given Forbes.com’s user figures, of where those visitors were going...

full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/techno...ml?ei=5090&en=f1750754c06cdb08&ex=1314417600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

From SiliconBeat:

Statistics on the Internet is like water for a flower. You need them for much of the Web to survive.

But independent third-party tracking of traffic to Web sites, and of user clicks on Web page links, is deeply flawed, developments this week at Google and elsewhere underscored. There doesn't seem to be any remedy in sight.

Web sites that rely on advertising -- including some the most poplar, such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube -- get paid based on the amount of traffic to their site and the number click-throughs on their ads. Without accurate data, advertisers have no idea how much they should be paying...

full article: http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2006/...ckles.html

[BellisimaJ.]

Web sites that rely on advertising -- including some the most poplar, such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube -- get paid based on the amount of traffic to their site and the number click-throughs on their ads.

And ebay,etc. :blinkie:

Interesting to see what happens here.