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How the fuck news about the Nielsen company make the front page here?
They don't do techy things, make techy things or relate to tech at all.

You mean like http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/ ?

Now that's good fer a god-honest knee-slappin' guffaw!

Thanks - I needed that.

Just so I don't get karma-slapped upside the OT head ... I've always thought of Nielson as a mechanism for pricing ads; like all representations of average behaviour, it doesn't say shinola about a particular individual's viewing habits. So, as long as the advertisers think they're getting value out of the metric, that's fine. But I've never talked to anyone who used a Nielson rating as a TV viewing guide.

Similarly, I've never talked to anyone who uses Nielson/NetRatings as a measure of the usefulness of quality/level of interest/etc. of a web site. And NetRatings doesn't even have the mindshare of Nielson the TV dudes. Anyway - in the context of a mechanism for ad pricing, google is the web equivalent of a TV ad about TV ads, which doesn't make any sense for a NetRatings rating. For that matter, what's the NetRatings measure of http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/ ?

Methinks that this announcement of a change in metric is just an attempt to get some profile on NetRatings' existence, and the notion of affecting google.com's measure for ads is plain absurd, because google *is* the advertiser. Drawing an equivalency between an indexing and search discovery mechanism like google and a less meta-focused content site is just boneheaded.

A bit of a lame submission IMHO.

Look at the context of the great-grandparent post. It wasn't speaking to Enron's energy commodity business but ``its internet services arm (which had at one time a deal with Blockbuster to sell movies over broadband). That arm was neither successful nor influential.

Also, you've made quite a few assertions that don't have anything to do with each other. That 97% of the music on iPods is from cd rips and pirated downloads says nothing about the whether or not the people buying from ITMS are geeks or not. ITMS customers are disproportionately 12 to 17 year olds which is not a demographic known for being IT geeks. They're also more likely to drive VWs and read Wired, FHM and Rolling Stone. I'm not certain that any of those are good indicators of geekdom except (and only arguably) reading Wired. In fact, I'd argue that the opposite is true, that the more tech savvy someone is, the less likely he or she is going to purchase music from ITMS. It isn't the gearheads who wander into the local CVS or Walgreen and pick up a ten dollar iTunes card as an impulse buy in the checkout lane.

Lastly, anyone who knows what a Cisco is and just what it has to do with wireless is probably is closer to being a geek than not a geek. Given how wrong you are about the ITMS user demographic, I have doubts that you're closer to the truth than me with regards to Airport.

AC fanboy says:

"where are you getting THAT information, eh? i'm sure Yahoo! is going to be real quick to tell you that they're the "Number One" site... but does that mean the most visits? unique audience? what?"

also he adds:

"for the record---plain old Yahoo.com still has LOTS of "crap" on their page. i don't know about you, but in the time it takes to load "POPULAR YAHOO SEARCHES," links for "Yahoo Small Business" and random shit like "BUZZ LOG" (whateverthehell THAT is), i could have typed my search term into the plain box on google.com."

So, I stupidly reply below:

A modem will compress text , yahoo has started to serve web while 14.4kbit was a fast connection, that style.

Some people has life and use the features of yahoo.

Also http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp?section =dat_to&country=us

Have a nice day

Do you think there is money to made at all when they are not charging?

Uh, ever hear of http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/? its called the "we know everything you do on the net because you volunarily filter it though our servers and we sell this to soda-pop and deodorent makers and shit" business model.
 
    Maybe they will feed ads through but all they really need are stats on net usuage to make money off this.

Why doesn't ACNielsen keep stats like they do TV ratings?

I don't know...

You can visit the Nielsen-NetRatings site and bone up a bit, and if you want, grab a a PDF of their corporate brochure which mentions that their techniques include the usual image tag bugs, but also techniques just like they use when they do TV ratings: interviews with "recall" information, journals, and other (for us web folks) seemingly unlikely approaches. It's all about doing sanity checking against traditional (and easily polluted) web stats. Big companies like to have their facts audited and tested by alternate methods, and Nielsen's been doing it for a long time with other hard-to-measure stuff.

You can visit the Nielsen-NetRatings site and bone up a bit, and if you want, grab a a PDF of their corporate brochure which mentions that their techniques include the usual image tag bugs, but also techniques just like they use when they do TV ratings: interviews with "recall" information, journals, and other (for us web folks) seemingly unlikely approaches. It's all about doing sanity checking against traditional (and easily polluted) web stats. Big companies like to have their facts audited and tested by alternate methods, and Nielsen's been doing it for a long time with other hard-to-measure stuff.

Nielsen
has the full report in PDF format, It was a short article

I imagine many people are like me, when I'm hanging out watching tv(which I do on my second monitor mainly), I'm also connected to the internet, either to followup on what I saw on TV, or to see if friends are on IM, or even just because I'm board and just do a sweep of news sites. The article says:

Nielsen//NetRatings concluded that mature markets are in wait of "the next big thing" whereas emerging markets were rife with opportunity for companies online. Some of the growth engines cited in the report is the proliferation of broadband and societal changes in media consumption.

I'm waiting for a more fully interactive TV/Computer/Internet I think, more then TIVO, and Digital Cable has given me.

PNG will only slow these people's experience down (for a marginal enhancement of experience . . . I don't know anyone complaining about lossy graphics looking crappy on modern websites) and they are/will be the majority of internet users.

Here

how do they come up with this number?

From the article: "Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, December 2003". More information on Nielsen's products may interest you.

If Nielsen's net ratings work anything like their TV ratings, then lucky families get paid to put a spybox between the cable modem and the home router, with full knowledge and consent of what's going on. I'd expect an airtight privacy policy; Nielsen has provided TV ratings for over a decade.

Fact is that yes more and more of us have the internet but Id hardly call a growth of 4% of the worlds population using the net: a basis for saying that all communication will happen via the internet. People just cant afford it.I see the internet as THE means of communication could happen for the moneyed clasees but conditions just arent there for it to be a universal means. After all a stamp at a one time price of 28p in the Uk costs a darn site less than the charges your isp slaps on you every month. While we have massive poverty in the world and inequlaities in socio-economic conditions then the net will not be THE way of communication.

Could it be Nielsen doesn't have the best numbers?

From their press release, I can't tell how they arrived at their numbers.

I also wonder about their "unique visitor" term.

It seems to me that file sharing admins would have a pretty good idea of the traffic on their networks.

Hard to really know what's going on with so little information.

A while ago I was contacted by Nielsen//NetRatings to allow them to monitor my Internet use. They gave me a $50 savings bond that I can't cash in for some time and so I think I lost it. Their software was basically an open proxy server that sat on the host machine. That was probably a security risk for people not behind firewalls, and I told them so. I don't know if they ever did anything about it because their members website was basically just a place to download the software. It lagged my net connections considerably and I routinely turned it off. At the time, I was also a bit of a BeOS fanatic and they only had a Windows version, so a lot of my browsing went undetected when I booted into BeOS.

You've probably noticed all the past tense I've been using. I could only endure their annoying software for so long, so I quit before they could give me another savings bond I would probably lose too.

There are two *newer* stories on cnet than the one referenced:

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-938423.html

and

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-938827.html.

The result? Apple is closer to it's competitors, but Real still leads, and is losing it's lead to MSFT.

A better link for Nielsen/Net Ratings (or whatever they're called - at least it's not "monday"):
http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/

Here is the PDF from Nielsen. It contains more data than the CNN story.