Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [61]
The good news is the remaining 219 visitors spent an average of seven minutes logged on to my site. The shortest was seven seconds (“Oh, it’s that asshole”), and the longest was sixteen hours, which leads me to believe that either someone left his computer on or I’m in the honeymoon stage of a relationship with my first official stalker! Forty-one of the 219 visitors actually wrote messages on my blog. So how would one measure my Web traffic on that particular day? Would the number be 554, 219, or 41?
The numbers are also open to interpretation at mega-sites, like Forbes.com, whose numbers are being calculated by companies such as Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore. According to an article in the New York Times, the Forbes site had 11.6 million visitors the month my piece ran. For the same period Nielsen/NetRatings put that number at 7.5 million, and comScore said 5.8 million. Digital skeptics might say it is all highly subjective and open to interpretation, but the truth is that the online ad experience is the most measurable of all media. Where else can one record time spent on a page, or click-throughs, or times the video trailer was watched or e-mailed to a friend? I suspect that accurately measuring online traffic and the demographic makeup of that traffic will only get better, although it will remain a major point of contention between media companies and advertisers as they negotiate rates for years to come.
Perhaps the best way to measure a site or product’s popularity isn’t by hits or time spent, but, according to Barbarian Group’s Benjamin Palmer, by the number of endorsements that visitors bestow upon it.
A quick note on customized ads. The other day I was participating in my favorite online group, the Fiction Files, talking about Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness. I happened to mention in one of my rambling, weakly substantiated, intellectually challenged comments how odd it was that the Polish-born Conrad preferred to write in English, his third language. Five minutes later, while my fellow Fiction Filers were taking the conversation to a more enlightened cyber place, the sponsored links on my page were displaying, in addition to the usual suspects about self-publishing and sex, a link to a travel agency that specialized in trips to Poland. Some call this prescient and intuitive. I call it frightening and unnerving. Ever meet a bug-eyed total stranger at a party who somehow knows way too much about you? That’s how “customized” Web ads (and people who spend sixteen-plus hours on a Web site with three hours’ worth of content) make me feel.
A Personal and Mostly Hypothetical Re-Creation of an Intuitive Online Advertising Experience
Hello, James!
Hello, James P. Othmer. We have some great personalized recommendations for you in our bookstore. For instance, we noticed that customers who bought Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer also bought trendy, must-read fiction by people much younger, hipper, and more gifted than you, like ZZ Packer, Chuck Palahniuk, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith. Perhaps you’d like to consider some more realistic, age-appropriate recommendations by authors with whom you might actually identify, like Nick Hornby, Richard Ford, John Irving, and the late Saul Bellow.
By the way, we’ve also noticed that your wife has recently purchased Woman Power by Dr. Laura, All Men Are Jerks Until Proven Otherwise by Daylle Deanna Schwartz, and (her fourth copy in six years of) The Peter Pan Syndrome by Dan Kiley. You might want to know that other husbands of wives who have recently purchased Woman Power by Dr. Laura, All Men Are Jerks Until Proven Otherwise