Branding More Important in Visitor Counts

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Since Mark was talking about measuring site traffic, I found this article from News.com interesting. The IAB, or Interactive Advertising Bureau, is proposing new rules on counting web traffic, all in hopes to make it easier for traditional advertisers, those who advertise on TV, radio and newspapers, will be a little more comfortable when shifting spending to internet properties.

One prominent issue comes down to branding. For example, sports news site ESPN.com attracts an estimated 15 million unique visitors a month, according to the audience-metric firm Nielsen NetRatings. Included in its traffic are an estimated 1.2 million unique visitors from content partner Active.com, an activity event site that displays a small logo from ESPN.com at the top right-hand corner of its pages.

Theoretically, under proposed rules that are still being worked out, ESPN would have to change Active.com’s pages in order to count that traffic. In fact, ESPN must be the dominant brand on the page, or comprise 75 percent of the brand attribution, in order to count it, according to proposed rules. ESPN could not be immediately reached for comment. Source: News.com

We Say: I’ve always wondered how they count traffic from their partners, etc. Like CNET, they have links to many sites in the footer of their site, such as ZdNet, Search.com, Webshots and even MP3.com. MP3.com just has a little sentence at the top that says CNET games and entertainment, and a similar footer, but you can’t really tell it’s a CNET site. Looks like they will have to change LOTS of sites and pages if they won’t to continue counting the traffic, we could see lot’s of website face lifts coming up. Note: It did say this has been in the works for about two years, so, it may be old news to some.