CNET News covers the first major ratings results from its revised audience ratings methodology at comScore's Media Metrix unit and the results are not altogether rosy for major portal providers. According to CNET under ComScore's new qSearch 2.0, Yahoo lost market share from a year ago and is now at 23.5 percent for July, while Google gained share, reaching 55.2 percent market share. The New York Times notes also a fall in Forbes.com's audience measurement from 15.3 million in its original February data to a revised figure of 13.2 million.

One of the key factors aiding Google in the new measurement system is comScore's inclusion of search queries initiated via Google's infrastructure through search partners, as well as queries into "universal search" categories such as news or images from a search engine's home page initiated off of an initial query.

All of this builds audience share, which despite protests from other portal providers about quality audiences is still a major factor. The difference now, though, is that ratings companies are recognizing that in a world of embedded content, OEM relationships and mashups the "here" of content is less about who comes to your site and more about how your content gets in front of audiences in many venues. Jeff Jarvis notes in a "portals are past" rant that it doesn't matter if you get 10,000 impressions on a site with an audience of 100 million impressions or from multiple sites with smaller audiences, which is somewhat to the point but misleading.

With advertisers focusing increasingly on conversational marketing and contextual ad placement the new audience metrics are rewarding publishers whose content can engage those audiences in as many finely defined contexts as possible. The issue is less the total size of a portal's audience and more the ability of a portal to define the right audiences for advertisers. It isn't so much a matter of "big is bad and small is good" as it is getting the right context for your audience no matter where they congregate.

This is where Google has done itself an enormous favor over the past several years in encouraging the use of its content via mashups, Google Co-Op and other tools that make it easy for both professionals and amateurs to use Google content in so many different contexts.
There is a lot to be said for the strategies of portals such as Yahoo! and Ask.com to engage audiences more deeply at their own destination sites to build quality audience engagement but they have lagged behind Google in defining unique contexts for content beyond their portals that may be less heavily branded but of equal value to advertisers. At publisher sites such as Forbes.com the problems are not so different, with a preponderance of traditionally syndicated content building up clicks but failing to produce enough unique content that can make a dent through their own syndication strategies to take advantage of new audience metrics.

In all of these instances Google gained an advantage by focusing on syndicating context rather than content, avoiding the expenses and lethargic pace of traditional content licensing deals in favor of making it easy for people to find anyone's content in the right context and to build additional and unique content around it. This can happen on large portals or small portals - it matters not to Google, as long as it keeps growing.

We've long held that portal strategies were topping out, so none of this comes as a terrible surprise, but it's interesting to see how advertisers in search of meaningful metrics are now one of the key drivers that are showing the way to online publishers who may have doubted the value of Google's strategies to advertisers. Traditional portals will continue to be important as branding mechanisms for content producers and marketers but the highly portable value of context is beginning to to carve away at the bottom line of portal producers.

Labels: audience measurement, embedding, mashups, portals, search, Trends

There's quite a bit of buzz out there about Neilsen/NetRatings deciding to remove page views from its Web site traffic measurement rankings. ComputerWorld notes along with others that technologies which enable the embedding of content such as AJAX make it harder to determine what people are really looking at: the page that someone is visiting or the widgets embedded in that page. Therefore Neilsen is preferring to gauge the total time that a visitor engages a site rather than how many pages that they're looking at in a site. Forbes notes that other site measurement services are not giving up on page views just yet, and that regardless of what this may or may not mean the Neilsen/NetRatings methodology is still a "black box" unavailable for auditor scrutiny.

Neilsen has an important point about AJAX technologies making page views that much harder to substantiate as important measurement metrics, but there are other factors at play here as well. The key point that Neilsen seems to be driving towards are measurements that will be meaningful to brand advertisers used to time-based measurements via television and radio. Page views just don't compute with many of these advertisers, and perhaps rightfully so. In the highly transitory world of page views there's hardly enough engagement to provide the level of content endorsement that brand advertisters seek when paying premium rates. So for advertisers seeking "mouse potatoes" who are deeply engaged in a particular site visit time can be a particularly important metric.

The other side of this, though, is that this type of behavior tends to favor social media sites, where there is not only a mix of AJAX-embedded content but as well deep streams of comments, bookmarks and other linked content that gets users working the scroll wheel on their mouses a lot harder these days. Oftentimes the hottest content on a social media site may have dozens of weblog entries in a single page or hundreds of comments: it can take several minutes of focused reading before someone may be ready to move from one page in a social media site to another. So oftentimes total page views in social media may be comparatively low while total time engagement may be comparatively high.

None of is likely to be sweet news to search engines such as Google, where people flit through highly transitory content on their way to destination sites where they dwell over in-depth content. Contextual ads are very potent in these type of page-view environments, though - ads that are not necessarily of interest to the brand advertisers that Neilsen hopes to serve. On the other side of the coin Google's YouTube portal should be a prime beneficiary of such measurements, enabling new revenue streams for video content from brand advertisers who were never quite sold on search engine page views. There are many other details to audience measurement that Neilsen and others must take into account when coming up with meaningful representations of online behavior, but given Neilsen's desire to maintain effective relationships with media companies and advertisers putting an increasing amount of brand advertising on the Web focusing on the time people spend on a site is a strong move towards supporting destination Web site content - and towards providing social media sites with a well-deserved revenue boost.

Labels: audience measurement, Google, neilsen, netratings, Social Media, Trends