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A L S O__T O D A Y
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
R E C E N T L Y Night of the living day traders Aliens blew up my garbage dump! First Amendment wins another round online The resurrection of Golgotha The Web's identity crisis - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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REACH FOR THE HITS | PAGE 1, 2
You probably remember ebullient Web hucksters touting astronomical "hit counts" circa 1994 and 1995, as in, "We're getting millions of hits a day!" Gullible TV and newspaper reporters who knew nothing about the Web would say, "What do you mean by 'hits'?" and, since the answer was too technical, they'd often just equate hits with visitors -- contributing to enormously inflated public notions of Web usage in those early days. As most Web users and all honest Web businesspeople now understand, a hit is a number recorded in the log files generated by Web server programs (which send pages to your computer). A hit gets generated for every file a Web server sends out -- and the typical Web page includes anywhere from a handful to dozens of separate files (generally, each image on the page is another file, and often what looks like one image on a page is actually a mosaic of several files). So hit counts, though valuable in setting technical benchmarks for server performance, are useless as any kind of realistic measure of Web traffic. From hits we graduated to the far more useful "page views" -- a count that discarded all those image files and simply tracked the number of HTML files a site sent out (which correlates quite closely to the number of Web pages read). Total page view counts for a day, week or month do tell you something about how much traffic a site has. But they don't tell you much about how many visitors it has: 100,000 page views in a week could be 10 people each reading 10,000 pages, or 100,000 people each reading one page, or any variation in between. So sites began tracking "unique visitors," or the similar "unique IP numbers." Even though Web sites don't know who you are by name, they know the computer your browser is on by a unique IP number, and by tallying these numbers they can get a pretty decent sense of how many individual people visited their site during a given time period. Page views and unique visitors are valuable statistics, and auditing companies like I/Pro emerged to validate them, but they both have serious drawbacks. If you hook up to the Net by dialing a modem into a service provider, odds are good you are assigned a "dynamic IP number": The number changes each time you dial up, so you might show up as 30 different "unique visitors" to a site you visited daily for a month. And the practice of "caching," which different kinds of networks (most notably AOL) adopt to speed the delivery of Web pages, reduces the amount of traffic (both page views and IP numbers) the originating site can accurately count. The new online medium had promised marketers and advertisers that it would offer them a wealth of detailed information about usage. But because of these complexities -- and because Web users resisted early experiments requiring site registration (HotWired was an important litmus test) -- it began to seem that the Web actually offered less reliable information about who saw what than even those dinosaurs, TV and radio. So over the last two years a wave of new companies -- led by Media Metrix but also including its competitors Relevant Knowledge (which Media Metrix purchased last October) and NetRatings (now allied with Nielsen) -- set out to measure the Web the old-fashioned way, following the "Nielsen family" model. Each of these companies finds a random, statistically valid sampling of users, plants tracking software on their computers and follows them on their online travels. Then it extrapolates those usage patterns to get a full picture of Web use: If 40 percent of participants visit any page on a particular site during a month, then that site has a 40 percent reach. In itself, sampling is a proven approach -- ask any pollster. But it's alarming that the competing sampling services seem to come up with wildly differing rankings. And Media Metrix has problems building a reliable sample: To date, its Achilles' heel has been its troubles getting its tracking software installed on workplace computers. Many commercial Web sites see their highest traffic during work hours and believe that their users are visiting from their office desks; these sites feel they're being short-changed by reach numbers. And though Media Metrix says it's working hard to improve its workplace coverage, many businesses are reluctant to install the software -- possibly for technical reasons, possibly because they don't want to learn how many of their employees are sneaking peeks at Penthouse on the job. Even if Media Metrix could guarantee that its sample properly captured both workplace and home use, though, I'd have problems with the concept of reach. As a measure of Web use, reach is weighted toward the superficial: It favors sprawling sites with vast collections of largely unrelated pages (like, for instance, GeoCities) over well-focused sites that collect specific groups of users with shared interests. Say one site has 200,000 loyal users who visit regularly; another has little regular traffic, but its wide variety of pages turn up in enough disparate search-engine results to attract brief visits during the course of a month from, say, 5 million visitors. The two sites may have identical page-view counts. The former site may actually have a more valuable franchise to sell to advertisers or to hand over to e-commerce partners -- but the latter site wins the reach contest by a landslide. Reach has its place in the arsenal of Web metrics, and I think the folks at Media Metrix and similar companies are honestly trying to build useful gauges of Web traffic. But their choice of which measurements to promote -- and the media's choice of which ones to adopt as standards -- will have a direct impact on the shape of the Web to come, and on what kinds of sites ultimately thrive. Reach is built upon an assumption that the Web is pretty much like TV and radio, and can be measured in a similar way. The more we adopt reach as the measure of Web success, the more we will be encouraging Web sites to attract and hold audiences using broadcast media's time-honored and depressing techniques of least-common-denominator persuasion, and the less we will be taking advantages of the traits -- interactivity, personalization, diversity of voices -- that make the Web unique. The point of the Web industry had better be to evolve into something
radically different from the broadcast world. Otherwise, hell, TV is a lot
easier to use -- and the video quality's better.
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