- September 11, 2007

An Embarrassment of Riches

Josh Chasin, our Chief Research Officer, has taken the leap as a columnist, contributing the Online Metrics Insider column for MediaPost Publications. In his first post, he provides a review, at breakneck speed, of the state-of-the-metrics industry. Josh helps put most of the key issues in our industry into neat perspective. I highly recommend you give the blog a read.

Josh’s main thesis is that: “one of the consequences of being the most measurable medium is that the Internet ends up as the medium with the most measures. We tend to experience this as paradox - the Internet is inherently measurable, yet measures are abundant and widely divergent. When you think about it, though, this is not paradoxical at all. Measurability begets measures. We have to stop letting this abundance of metrics keep us from doing the business we need to do.”

Among the issues Josh addresses are…

  • What are the key differences between the approaches of Comscore, NetRatings, Alexa, Hitwise, Quantcast, and Compete?
  • What is the essence of the audience measurement versus web analytics dispute?
  • Why is there so much variation in web analytics results?
  • Will the MRC audits and accreditation ameliorate the differences in the metrics reported by different sources?
  • Do we need to standardize the standards?

Read Josh’s post to get his view on these and other pressing issues in the measurement of online behavior.

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