Pay the price for net watcher statistics

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

A year ago anyone researching the local internet market would have had a hard job finding hard figures, but now at least three companies are actively monitoring our internet market.

This year United States-based research firm ACNielsen has been joined by two Australian companies - Red Sheriff and Hitwise.

So it would appear that internet media buyers or site owners, anxious to see how they are performing are spoiled for choice. But are they?

Each of these companies employs very different methodology and all are disparaging about their competitors' results.

For example, ACNielsen is the only company that installs monitoring software in the homes of more than 3500 randomly selected panellists, so their every click is tracked.

"There are some other companies out there but they are not really operating in the same space," says Brian Milne, Asia Pacific managing director of Nielsen NetRatings. "We are about measuring real people while the other two services are measuring log files or client files of data."

Mr Milne says NetRatings therefore records page views - that is complete pages that have been downloaded fully. The other companies are merely measuring server requests, he says, which could be just frames (parts of web pages) or refreshed pages, which are sometimes sent automatically.

But Mr Milne admitted that NetRatings could be fooled by sites or programs which automatically redirect traffic to other sites. Microsoft Windows Media Player for example, checks the Microsoft site for possible software upgrades at least once a month. Other programs such as passport, make frequent references to msn.com and its local gateway msn.co.nz.

We asked Mr Milne if such re-directions could account for some of the popularity of Microsoft sites, usually first in NetRatings figures.

"That's true of our service too, but it can happen on all services," he said.

He says NetRatings clients are provided with data that is detailed enough that they can manually weed out re-directed traffic, but it is a slow and laborious process.

Meanwhile Hitwise takes a very different approach to NetRatings, and the company's New Zealand site, which went live this month, explains the pitfalls of the panel approach at length.

Hitwise takes its data from the logs of proxy servers at internet service providers, which are used to store frequently accessed pages. The company claims that this method allows it to study the surfing behaviour of 350,000 New Zealanders and allows it to discern a very accurate relative ranking of site traffic.

While its reports are not as detailed as NetRating's, they are not as expensive either, costing $59.95 a month, compared with the $30,000 to $100,000 it says panel-based research costs.

But when we tried out the Hitwise site last week, we were surprised by the results. Anyone may enter up to 5 internet addresses and will be shown the top 11 sites in that category.

Hitwise returned www.msn.co.nz as the most popular New Zealand site across all categories, with 11.7 per cent of traffic. This was not a surprise considering the redirection problem, but the University of Auckland ranked in second place scoring 6.4 per cent, beating Xtra with 3.8 per cent, seemed unlikely.

Hitwise will not say which ISPs it is monitoring, but it assures customers that the privacy of users is protected by the ISPs at all times.

It is understood that Xtra is not among the ISPs used, but an industry source suggested that the University of Auckland is.

Hitwise international business director Brendan McKeegan denied that the university was one of the ISPs used and said the result reflected the importance of educational internet users. He then said that the university was one source of Hitwise data, but that any abnormally high results were eliminated by Hitwise's methodology.


Links


msn

Hitwise

University of Auckland