Lacking a "standard traffic measure equivalent to runs
in baseball," Web sites "hail whatever numbers make them
look the best," according to David Sweet of the WALL STREET
JOURNAL INTERACTIVE, who wondered, "Isn't there a way to
unearth a Web traffic measurement to suit all?" There are
various measuring methodologies in the industry today, as
Nielsen//NetRatings samples 65,000 Internet users to measure
traffic from home and from work, while Media Metrix "counts
on" 55,000 users, and PC Data, which is the only one to
advertise, recruits "as many panelists" as the two combined
-- 120,000 (WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE, 10/11).
EXAMPLES: Sweet noted that when ESPN.com announces
monthly traffic, its "dominance drawing unique visitors is
cited," however, when the site looks to attract advertisers,
"page views are touted." ESPN Internet Ventures
spokesperson Eric Handler explained, "Advertisers are
looking for cost per thousand of page views. That's at the
heart of Internet advertising." But SportsLine.com
President of Sales & Marketing Mark Mariani countered, "The
marketplace doesn't care how many page views you're doing.
... I think any third-party service that is trying to
guesstimate page views is just flat-out ridiculous." Sweet
added that when it comes to measuring a "unique visitor,"
that person can go to a Web site "once a month or 700 times,
but he's only counted once [and] a page that is loaded
successfully onto a users' browser is tallied as a page
view." To tabulate ESPN.com's "unique visitors" each month,
Media Metrix measures eight URLs, such as ESPN.com and
SportsLine.com but doesn't include other ESPN produced
sites, such as NFL.com. But SportsLine.com cites net
traffic from "more than" 140 URLs, including Web addresses
such as Sun-Goddess.com and others which "redirect" to
Sports.com, SportsLine.com's European venture. In August,
Media Metrix counted 6,269,000 unique visitors for ESPN.com
and 5,361,000 unique visitors for the SportsLine.com sites,
while PC Data "tallied 1.4 million more unique visitors to
ESPN.com and 210,000 more to SportsLine.com than Media
Metrix did, even though PC Data only tracked seven URLs
between the two sites and didn't count SportsLine's other
properties" (WSJ.com, 10/11).
