Category: Research

The Digital Divide has been bridged by libraries and schools , according to Arbitron and Edison Media Research. The report includes a lot of information on streaming media users as well.

When you look at Internet use at home and work, The divide is small, but significant. 48% of Hispanics and 6% of African Americans have Internet access at home or work compared with 70% among whites.

When you include school and library access, 75% of the total population has access to the Internet compared with 74% of African Americans and 65% of Hispanic Americans.

These numbers are interesting in light of eMarketer’s recent assertion that US Internet penetration will peak at 80%. Their conclusion seems about right, but their line of reasoning doesn’t prove it.

We have a few more details on ComScore Media Metrix’s recent restatement of their at-work measurements, thanks to the Internet Advertising Report.

First, ComScore acquired Media Metrix’s sample, but not its software. Second, ComScore was combining two samples collected by very different means (telephone and email recruitment), and combining two very different measuring systems (end-user and proxy server based) at the same time it was expanding its sample.

Without the tracking software, ComScore incorporated its own server-based measuring system with the November 2002 release of Media Metrix 2.0.

In addition to the 50,000 home Internet users recruited via Random Digital Dial sampling methodology, Media Metrix 2.0 expanded its measurement panel to 120,000, including 35,000 samples of at-work and university users.

No wonder there were some problems with their numbers.

Today, Comscore confessed that its numbers for last fall are wrong. The principal source of the problem was its estimate of at-work use. At-work use is notoriously difficult to measure.
But the Times hints at a bigger problem with web site ratings: what are they for?
When advertisers are paying by the exposure, or even the click or the sale, is it really important which site is number one?
When advertisers are (properly) more focused on response than branding, and when its so easy to test a campaign on the Net, is it really important what the demographics of a site are?
The Times tells us some alarming things about differences between the services:

• Comscore has cut its estimate of the time users spend on some sites by as much as 75%
• Comscore and Nielsen use radically different methods for sampling at-work users (email vs. random-digit-dial)
• ComScore says Yahoo had 107 million users in the United States in December. Nielsen says it was 81 million.
• ComScore measures usage on college campuses and Nielsen does not, but this is not enough to account for the difference in the Yahoo numbers.

Web advertising must be conducted like direct marketing and not like broadcast. Overreliance on ratings is malpractice.

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.

An online survey of the brand preferences of readers of a branding site claims Google is the top global brand, beating out Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Nike, and Nokia. What was remarkable was how many references (CBS Marketwatch, Internetnews.com, Toronto Globe & Mail, UPI, The NYTimes’ Boston.com and Reuters) I keep seeing to this awful piece of fake research.

There’s a kernal of truth that makes this story popular. Google is an important brand (as are Yahoo, Amazon, and Starbucks) that achieved legendary status without advertising. Outside of the realm of consumer packaged goods, the role of advertising compared to actual product execution in building a brand is negligible. We forgot this important lesson during the Bubble.

On the other hand, this story, the forehead advertising story, and the success of Krispy Kreme demonstrate that a little clever hype is often an acceptable substitute for quality.