Paul Boutin’s Slate article Slate Has 8 Million Readers, Honest has the sub-title “Or maybe it’s 4 million. Which should you believe?” The point? The web offers a level of measurement media has never seen before, and it’s still not complete or agreed upon. Perhaps because the measurements could possibly be so accurate and comparable across different sites, the arguments over minutaie of cookie-deletion rates and the like continue to tie publishers, agencies, advertisers, and the third-party measurement services in knots.
Kudos to the Slate publisher (who is not disinterested) in sharing their internal numbers. I’ve often wondered aloud about whether total transparency would be helpful in this area. As the article notes, I would be hard-pressed to find a single web site whose audience (both unique users and pageviews) wasn’t bigger in internal numbers than the third-party counts.
And with all this, TV ratings haven’t blown up yet? Crazy.