Source :
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001949.html
May 4, 2009, Lorcan Dempsey OCLC
From an article in the MIT Technology Review ...
.... confusion about the size of web audiences is universal.
No one really knows how many
people visit websites. No established third-party supplier of audience
measurement data is trusted. Internal Web logs exaggerate audiences. This
matters to more people than investors, like McNamee, who worry that they have
no way to evaluate new-media businesses. The issues involved are technical, and
occluded by ugly jargon, but they concern anyone anxious about the future of
media as print and broadcast television and radio shrink in importance. [But who's counting]
The article
contends that the absence of a reliable and agreed measure of web audience
means that there are no authoritative third party measuring services which in
turn is impeding the development of online advertising.
It also
profiles Quantcast, a company which is
trying to fill that gap. I look at Quantcast occasionally. I find its listing
of other sites interesting, other sites liked and other sites linked: the list
for the BBC is given here. (Caveat: I have not looked into how Quantcast
assembles this data and note it here just for interest.)
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