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Are Web Ratings Dangerous To Sites?

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-million-different-ways-to-count dept.

Freshly Exhumed writes "For website publishers, a poor web rating can be disastrous. Bad television ratings mean television shows get canceled, bad web ratings mean websites go out of business. For advertisers, accurate web ratings are critical to optimize spending. Inaccurate ratings data means advertisers will overspend on poorly performing sites or not advertise on smaller sites whose numbers are really much higher than reported. In the case of Canadian web site Digital Home, already hit with an advertising boycott by Bell Canada over the site's pro-consumer editorial content, the site's owner is now in danger of ending operations, apparently due to the inaccuracies of ComScore rankings. For example, Google Analytics reported Digital Home served up over 2.7 million page views in January to almost 250,000 unique visitors. A web buyer at one of Canada's largest advertising agencies confirmed that ComScore reported just 32,000 visitors. Added to this is ComScore's secretly-installed spyware troubles."

4 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot summary's link is wrong. by Kadin2048 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The page linked to in the Slashdot summary is an after-the-fact rehash of the initial advertising takedown announcement.

    Here's the original: http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/1799/1/

    Friday, 13 April 2007

    Bell Canada today - April 13th - pulled all of its advertising from Digital Home citing our refusal to take down an article which informed readers about a new generation of satellite receivers expected to arrive in July.

    In the article , Digital Home stated that the information was from Bell ExpressVu dealers and that the company had yet to publicly announce the receiver specifications.

    Yesterday, I was contacted by a press relations representative from Bell Canada and was informed that Bell Canada "might" pull its advertising from Digital Home Canada if the article was not removed from the Digital Home site.

    The PR representative explained the request came from Pat Button, the Vice President of Marketing at ExpressVu. The representative said Mr. Button had seen the article and demanded it be taken down from the site because it was having a negative impact on dealer sales. The representative also said that it was impossible for Bell to be releasing new HD receivers this year because a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the receivers had not even been issued by ExpressVu.
    Basically, ExpressVu wanted to keep a lid on the fact that all the MPEG-2 receivers that are being sold today will soon be totally obsolete because they're transitioning to MPEG-4. What a bunch of slimebags.

    Ironically, it was on Friday the 13th, too.
    --
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  2. Are we missing something? by 8127972 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How about the fact that Bell not only threatened Digital Home with pulling it's ads because of an article it didn't like, but then doing so? Is that not a bigger issue than how the site is ranked? Let's look at the facts for a sec:

    1. Bell threatened to pull their ads because his article "was having a negative impact on dealer sales."

    2. Digital Home presents that what they said is accurate and is confirmed by multiple sources. Not to mention that this info was public domain.

    3. Bell yanks it's ads.

    It sounds like Bell is ticked that people are going to wait a couple of months before they get a receiver for HDTV from them because they want the latest and greatest. You can't fault the consumer for that.

    If this was happening to the New York Times, we'd be up in arms and this would be under "Your Rights Online" or "Censorship." But somehow this is a story about Comscore. I'm not saying that that aspect of the story doesn't have merit, but there's an equally important issue here that needs to be explored.

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    This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
    1. Re:Are we missing something? by ivan256 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If this was happening to the New York Times, we'd be up in arms and this would be under "Your Rights Online" or "Censorship."


      Advertisers pull their ads when they don't like the content all the time. Even from the New York Times. Why should Bell be forced to advertise on a site the disapprove of?
  3. Well there's still some good news by solar_blitz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If web ratings go through, crappy sites might get the axe. That's a whole lot of MySpace pages the world can do without.