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Hits or Misses: Who is Your Website's Audience?

Posted by Hemos on from the interesting-informationo dept.

securitas writes "The Christian Science Monitor's Gregory M. Lamb wrote a story interesting to anyone who runs a website: How do you accurately and reliably measure the audience for your website? From the article: 'Most websites have no idea how many people view their content. This inherent fuzziness is causing problems for commercial websites, especially online publications desperate to make money from Internet advertising... How can you charge for ads when it's nearly impossible to tell advertisers how many people will see them?' The article discusses the flaws and problems with Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix - they grossly undersample workplace users - and the rise in the number of sites requiring user registration."

9 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. As Ty Webb would say... by Sqwubbsy · · Score: 5, Funny

    By height.

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  2. mmm... by manavendra · · Score: 5, Funny

    I dont know what the real strategy of most online newspaper websites is, but they seem to follow this pattern:

    1. Make content available online, free of cost
    2. Wait for people to start using and monitor the growth in number of hits
    3. Reduce the website response to a crawl with mind numbing popups, flash ads, quick time ads, and generally anything that would make sure the user "spends" more a few minutes on the homepage
    4. Wait for most users to go away to some other website.
    5. The few braves who remain - force them to register and read all the content, since you want to chart your users by demography.
    6. Finally, now make most of the content premium - based upon the data collected in step 5, however inaccurate it is. Flood the site with more ads, if possible
    7. Moan and bitch that there is no revenue generated.

    8. Repeat cycle

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  3. Editors at Slashdot... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    may think their audience is a bunch of nerds, but in reality its a bunch of suave playboys that get to have sex with many hot women. I suggest they make the appropriate content changes.

    1. Re:Editors at Slashdot... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      "if they took all the porn off the internet, there'd only be one site left, and it'd be called 'bringbacktheporn.com'"

  4. Lets show Mr Lamb and the CSM by WormholeFiend · · Score: 3, Funny

    I suppose the CSM is about to discover how many slashdotters view the content of this website...

  5. Page Counter by Omega1045 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I would put a CGI page counter at the bottom of every page. I think the one with flame numbers works the best for this, but the digital looking on also works well.

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  6. i just dont care by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    i dont care who looks at my site as long as my statistics page reports more than just me.

  7. After careful review by Joe+U · · Score: 2, Funny

    After careful review of our target audience, we have have begun work on our new bulk Prozac and Lithium banner ad campaign.

  8. Re:The most interesting is Alexa's model by Singletoned · · Score: 3, Funny
    The other sad thing is, there are companies that use Alexa's page rankings to decide how much they'll pay for ads. Go figure.

    Of course, they do. If they find out that a site has a large number of idiots looking at it, they will want to advertise. That's their target audience.