Back in the U.K., where people still read newspapers, there’s some good old-fashioned arguing over which paper is getting the biggest audience online. The fight is highlighting the different ways difference analytic systems measure traffic. Red Herring reports that the Daily Telegraph has launched an ad campaign in which it claims it’s “Britain’s number one quality newspaper website” ("quality" seems to mean “not a tabloid"). The Telegraph is basing its claim on Hitwise numbers, while competing metrics company Nielsen/NetRatings puts the Guardian on top. Comscore puts them both behind tabloids.
Simon Waldman of the Guardian begins an incredibly detailed blog post with the assertion “I am something of a web metrics nerd” and he lives up to the title. He analyzes various pools of data—sometimes to the Guardian‘s advantage, but not always—and acknowledges that the current methods of measuring traffic are both wanting and very difficult to compare. If you have the time today, it’s a good summing-up of the state of the art of web metrics (and its discontents).
But how important are pageviews? Red Herring asked Gartner’s Andrew Frank. “There’s a growing consensus in the industry that page views may not be the best way of determining the value for a site,” he said. “All of the stuff of Web 2.0 flies in the face of the page view model for measuring exposures or impressions.”
Related:
--British newspapers optimize for Google--and pay Google, just to make sure