11 Comments Add your own

• 1. tdc  |  December 6th, 2007 at 1:39 pm

  so much for the argument that EVERYBODY heads FIRST to their “trusted local source”.

  that and the fact local omaha advertisers spent most of their $ on folks out-of-market.

  nice intuitive domain name though.

  hey, what’s with the site analytics lately? it seems some are being gamed…BIGTIME.

  again, this fudging of the numbers is going to end badly with everyone pointing fingers at each other.

• 2. Don Day  |  December 6th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

  Yikes. For some reason this tale scares the crud out of me.

• 3. carol  |  December 6th, 2007 at 9:02 pm

  I was so happy to see on the Am. news this evening stories of the people who lost their lives, instead of talking about the person that caused this pain and horror. This could have been prevented. His only family knew he had problems, why in the hell did he have guns. Please, what is wrong with people. Get with it, get the message. I send my prayers and love to the strangers that lost loved ones.
  Carol, Cape Breton, NS. Canada.

• 4. mo from ne  |  December 6th, 2007 at 10:33 pm

  The crash and intermittent service of omaha.com doesn’t surprise me. The online version of the state’s paper of record has been short on content since it’s redesign.
  As a side note and maybe this might shed some light on where the resources are going….a few years ago I was at an event for young journalists where Harold Anderson, OWH publisher emeritus, told us that the Internet was just a fad.
  My prayers and thoughts are with the victims of this terrible crime.

• 5. Joe  |  December 7th, 2007 at 10:08 am

  “so much for the argument that EVERYBODY heads FIRST to their ‘trusted local source’.”

  Actually, it seems they did. That’s why the site crashed.

• 6. Franklin  |  December 7th, 2007 at 10:59 am

  You know, tdc, I don’t know what your problem is with IB (or what your agenda is), but these repetitve complaints about gaming numbers is tiring.

  It’s not like I’m some big supporter of them, but if you have some complaint with details, I’d love to hear it. Otherwise, these little snarky asides make you look like some disgruntled employee.

• 7. tdc  |  December 7th, 2007 at 1:15 pm

  it’s certainly NOT ib that i’m calling out on this.

  it’s one of their equity investors.

  actually, the point about a disgruntled employee might be better suited to describe the 3 or 4 emails i’ve gotten from people who seem to be current employees encouraging me to continue to call hearst argyle out on this.

  it’s called credibility.

  HERE’S “THE DETAILS”, pal.

  how can 30 sites draw 18 million monthly uniques and a total of 70+ draw 2.5 million LESS???

  ib cites nielsen in their numbers (good or bad counting doesn’t mean a thing, at least they are consitent)

  hearst on the other hand used web trends (a company their HIRED???) to gin those numbers.

  i say it hurts IB’s credibilty too though and it should be them calling them out on this… which by the emails i mentioned seems like something some there want to do, but might not be in such a good position as i.

  you can verify EVER damn word of my contentions by pulling up the releases.

  enough details?

  i can always give you more (and probably will in the days and weeks to come).

  later franklin.

• 8. Ed  |  December 7th, 2007 at 7:04 pm

  You make it sound so sinister, when its simply the discrepancy between a measuring system that uses a tiny not-entirely-random sample and extrapolates it out to the entire internet (nielson), and a company that uses tracking tags embedded in all the web pages of the websites to count as best they can (barring disabled javascript and cookie-defeating software).

  The folly is in the assumption that you can compare numbers derived from vastly different methodologies.

  I’d be happy to post a tutorial on web-site statistics for you if you need further information.

• 9. tdc  |  December 8th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

  it’s only “sinister” when it’s spun like it is/was.

  if nielsen’s numbers are good enough for tv, why not the web?

  this “simple discrepancy” has the potential of making huge waves in the advertising industry.

  it’ll work well when tv side sales people say “see, you can’t trust them web numbers… stick with our crappy :30’s”.

  if the industry can tolerate this canyonwide discrepancy, then it’s the industry that needs a tutorial.

• 10. Ed  |  December 8th, 2007 at 2:01 pm

  I’m still not sure what your point is.

  Nielson rolls all the IB sites into a single “IB Network” number. Nielson does not report on individual IB sites.

  They are not able to provide a traffic number for a single site, or the Hearst sites in aggregate.

  Therefore, to get a number for a single Hearst site, or the Hearst sites as a whole, the only way to do this is to use the Webtrends numbers.

  All of the advertisers that I work with are well aware of the issues between Nielson’s numbers and internal (either contracted or internally counted). They’ve been dealing with these issues for years.

  And, to ice this cake, these are not even the numbers that advertisers see! The ad management and delivery system (DART, I think) produces its own numbers.

  You do realize, right, why a company like IB contracts their stats, right? It’s simply not cost effective to do it internally. It takes longer then 24 hours to process the logs for the last 24 hours. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of pageviews per month. Tens of Billions of hits - which is tens of billions of lines of log files - per month.

  For a company like IB to be able to store stats for the last year would require many terabytes of storage.

  You’re just freaking out about something that is no big deal to anybody that’s had to deal with these stats numbers for years.

• 11. tdc  |  December 8th, 2007 at 7:01 pm

  first, i’m not freaking out. i do enjoy the debate, so thanks!

  i do think the topic of counting will soon become a hot one.

  webtrends # ’swere 18M uniques over 30 sites (by HA’s own press release). that equates to an average of 600,000 per. hearst has only 1 top 10 market station and another in the top 20, right? the bulk are below the 100 mark, are they not?

  neilsen (spelled with an E last time i looked) has an aggregate number of 15.5M over the aggregate number of 70+ sites. that’s an average of 220,000 per.

  you think (or do you want people to think) that a “simple discrepancy) of 300% (YES! 300%!) is a tolerance or margin of error that the web world will live with?

  i think not.

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