Month: February 2003

According to Nielsen//NetRatings [“The extra slash is for slashing prices!”] Raleigh, NC’s active at home online population grew 29% from January 2002 to January 2003, and Nashville and Sacramento grew by 19%. That seems…implausible.

N//NR continues:

The fastest growing local market experienced some big shifts in income levels over the past year. In Raleigh, the number of people with at home Internet access reporting a household income of $75,000 to $99,999 a year increased by 72 percent (see Table 2) from January 2002 to January 2003. Other high-income groups online grew as well with the $100,000 to $149,999 income bracket growing eight percent and the wealthiest bracket of $150,000 to $999,999 moving up 17 percent. By contrast the lowest household income bracket for those with at home Internet access saw its active online audience decrease by 26 percent.

“Raleigh has experienced major growth in high income households that have Internet access over the past year,” said Bloom “This will make it a prime regional target for marketers looking to push big ticket items like luxury cars and appliances.”

This recommendation would be wrong even if the data were correct, which I doubt. Wouldn’t it make more sense to target your ads to markets with the greatest concentration of affluent customers and not the fastest growth?

WebWord has an great discussion of Jakob Nielsen’s latest screed — “Homepage Real Estate Allocation“. The consensus seems to be that he hasn’t had a new idea since the nineties and that he’s more concerned with selling books and seminars than on increasing usability.

Jakob is a force for good on the Web and it’s hard to argue with the idea that most home pages have too little information on them. But his ruthlessly reductionist approach ignores design as a source of humanity and pleasure as well as information. As Adam Greenfield says, “Poor Jakob. What a cold universe he must occupy.”

Finally, Jakob illustrates this piece with a pie chart, the worst information graphic in the known universe. I defy you to guess the absolute or relative sizes of the OS, Navigation, and Content slices in Jakob’s chart without refering to the the text.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution carried a story saying that a lot of news sites, with the exception of USA Today’s parent Gannett were moving to required registration. Now, USA Today says it’s testing registration, asking for gender, zip code and year of birth.

How reliable is this self-reported data? I lie on site registrations unless there’s a compelling reason to tell the truth, and I’m not alone. A friend of mine tries to get this fellow Safeway customers to trade discount cards with him simply so he can dirty up their database.

On a lot of sites, the most populous zip code is 90210. That might be a good way to test the quality of a registration database. Divide the percentage of the Internet population that’s in 90210 by percentage of the site’s population whose zip code is 90210 and multiply the result by 100. The closer a site’s index is to 100, the higher the quality of its self-reported demographics.

Any advertiser that accepts self-reported demographics on required-registration news sites is guilty of professional malfeasance.

As media sites discover the benefits of selling the at-work audience to advertisers, the problem of measuring the at-work audience becomes more pressing.

Ratings services depend on the cooperation end-users in measuring their use. But what if the computer and the network it’s connected to aren’t owned by the user?

As far as I know, it’s not possible to get a representative sample of at-work Web users.

US residents are a lot less likely to use a mobile phone than the people in any country in Europe, according to Telephia (via Emarketer).

Emarketer thinks this is because (1) land line phone service is cheap in the US and (2) GSM is widespread in Europe. I wonder if it has anything to do with the atrocious marketing and pricing by US providers. Whatever you think of the Baby Bells and the people who regulate them, they have created a system as simple and cheap as our mobile system is expensive and complex.

If Michael Powell gets his way, our land line service will look more like our mobile service.

Emarketer is offering a free research report on at-work use. This report supports the growing trend to selling at-work readers as a distinct market to advertisers.