.

A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Is Microsoft disinformation rumor bogus?   T A B L E__T A L K Are you as sick of the Microsoft trial as you are of the Senate trial? Vent your frustrations about software monopolies, bad haircuts and all things Microsoft in the Digital Culture are of Table Talk   Search for technology books, software and more at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author   R E C E N T L Y Night of the living day traders By Dana Blankenhorn Meet the new breed of Net-obsessed, short-term stock traders (02/04/98) Aliens blew up my garbage dump! By Andrew Leonard SimCity is back -- and managing municipal utilities has never been so much fun (02/03/99) First Amendment wins another round online By Janelle Brown Court rules against Net censorship bill (02/02/99) The resurrection of Golgotha By Howard Wen Volunteer programmers rescue a defunct company's software -- and produce a do-it-yourself tool for building 3-D games (02/01/99) The Web's identity crisis By Scott Rosenberg Intel's processor-I.D. gaffe shows how badly tech companies want to know who you are and where you live (01/29/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

Reach for the hits Why is it so hard to find a valid yardstick for measuring Web traffic? - - - - - - BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | When Yahoo bought GeoCities last week in a stock swap valued at $3.5 billion or so (depending on when you checked the companies' gyrating stock prices), one big force driving the deal was Yahoo's yen to top "the ratings." Yes, like its idiot-box forebear, the Web now has ratings -- and most often today, Web ratings means Media Metrix's monthly "reach" stats. Thus Yahoo's press release boasted, "With the addition of GeoCities to the Yahoo! network, the companies expect their combined unduplicated home/work reach to exceed 58 percent, which would make it the second largest network of properties on the Web." (AOL/Netscape is No. 1.) News reports dutifully repeated this claim. But what is this thing called reach? It's a measure of the percentage of the Web-surfing population who alight on a company's pages at least once in a given time period (usually a month). There are all sorts of questions and problems surrounding reach, and the specifics of Media Metrix's approach to measuring Web traffic. But that hasn't stopped the media and industry analysts from beginning to adopt it as a standard. Of course, in the novel, hype-driven world of Web publishing, we need standards. Vast sums of money -- both stock-generated "play money" and real cash -- are changing hands based on perceptions of how much traffic sites are garnering. So it's no wonder people have begun to grab the nearest yardstick, however bent it may be. Still, to judge the success of Web businesses by reach is to continue to view the Web by standards more suited to TV or radio. Not only is it strategically unwise for businesspeople and investors; it also risks crippling the still-nascent Web by creating incentives for site operators to favor one-time visitors and stray traffic over loyal customers. To understand why, let's review the history of Web traffic measurement from the medium's genesis. In the beginning was the hit. And the hit was with the server, and the hit was ... whatever you wanted it to be. - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T__P A G E .|. And hits begat page views, and page views begat unique users