WOWT Questions Website Statistics

WOWT News Director John Clark disputes KETV’s claim that its website, KETV.com, had three times more unique visitors than WOWT.com in March.

“I'm not really sure where you or Nielsen got the numbers for WOWT,” Clark said, referring to a April 11th story. “But I can tell you the number is nowhere remotely close to what the real traffic on our site is.”

Clark said WOWT contracts with Clickability, a San Francisco software company that advertises itself as "the leading single-source provider of web publishing technologies for traditional and enterprise publishers." The company has provided services for the publishing and management of 23 Gray Television locations since 2002.

According to Clickability, WOWT.com had 451,728 unique visitors in March. That is more than triple the 107,000 that KETV referenced in its press release (using information provided by Nielsen/Net Ratings).

The way web visitation is measured has changed over the years. Most recently, the "unique visitor" statistic has emerged as arguably the most reliable way of gauging audience. A unique visitor is, theoretically, a single person who visited a site within a specified period.

However, measurement services like Nielsen/NetRatings, Media Metrix, @Plan and comScore Media Metrix occasionally face criticism for the numbers they generate. The controversy is understandable, since companies compete for web visitors and advertising dollars.

Initially, web sites referred to the number of "hits" received – either cumulatively or during a particular time period. A "hit" is recorded every time anyone, anywhere clicks to a site, even if the full web page does not load on their screen. So the same person logging on from both home and their office is counted as two hits.

As sites became more sophisticated and incorporated multiple pages, the "page view" became a more common measurement. But that, too, proved to be an inexact measurement. If someone visits a website’s home page, reads a story that takes up two pages, and returns to the home page, that counts as four "page views." But it is still only one person.

Nielsen/NetRatings, which was launched in 1999, claims to be the industry's standard for Internet and digital media measurement and analysis. (Nielsen Media Research, which is a separate company, is a leading provider of television audience measurement and related services in the world.)

According to Suzy Bausch, Nielsen/NetRatings spokeswoman, more than 30,000 people nationwide, who are called “panelists,” are selected to participate through telephone calls placed randomly. Each panelist agrees to let Nielsen/NetRatings place software on their home or work computer to record the websites they visit, how often they visit them, how long they stay, etc.

Bausch said the company feels very strongly about how it goes about recruiting these panelists and collecting information.

“It’s the gold standard in terms of market research data,” she said.

Because panelists are located throughout the nation, it is possible some of the data regarding local websites falls below Nielsen/NetRatings’ reporting cutoff for accurate measurement, Bausch said. Upon further review of the numbers released to KETV last month, that is the case, Bausch acknowledged.

In a March 6 measurement by Nielsen/NetRatings’, KETV.com was shown with 393,000 unique visitors and Omaha.com with 219,000. However, each number was flagged for not meeting the minimum sample size standards.

“Projected and average measures for these sites may exhibit large changes month-to-month as a result,” said a notation on the measurement report. KMTV.com and WOWT.com had insufficient sample sizes for reliable projection of audience size, Nielsen/NetRatings said. Thus, no numbers were released for those websites.

Whether WOWT puts much stock in Nielsen/Net Ratings’ research or not, it does reference the company on its Internet advertising page, citing the fact that “daytime users spend 68 percent of their time, while on the Internet, on news sites (such as WOWT.com).”