Internet Advertising Hits A Roadblock
The internet advertising world has turned into a multi-billion dollar per year business. With more avenues for advertisers than ever before, this trend seems to be going nowhere but up. But one problem may halt the ever-increasing industry – Hits!
Without a universal way to measure a websites value an advertiser really has no way to determine how much they will spend to show their ads on a site. Industry experts such as ComScore and Nielsen have made a great deal by offering up their ESTIMATES on a sites traffic. Both services vary heavily on their estimates though.
One example in this hotly debated topic is Style.Com. Style’s internal stat counters showed a total of 1.8 million visits in August while ComScore and Nielsen showed dramatically lower ratings. ComScore estimated traffic to be 421,000 hits while Nielsen was a little more optimistic with 497,000 hits estimated.
Will industry growth continue at this rapid pace without a rock solid statistic to base it on? I’m sure it will continue to grow, but I think the pace might slow down until we can reach some sort of universal count on how many hits a site actually generates. Alexa, Technorati, and the above mentioned stat services might be a good indication of a sites popularity, but it is by no means an exact science. What will it take to get one global method of counting statistics?
