Ad buyers in other media have long enjoyed stats from accepted metrics bodies like BARB (TV), Rajar (radio) and NRS (print) – but, in online, it’s those ‘ol unique users that have ruled the waves.
But the UK Online Measurement group (UKOM), a rebooted version of the former Joint Industry Committee for Internet Measurement Systems (JICIMS), is trying to create an equivalent audience metric for the web, and it’s appointed Nielsen to manage it.
Nielsen will supply UKOM’s Audience Planning System (APS), the part that is aimed at helping ad buyers and agencies use demographic and other data to target campaigns at specific online audiences. It’s one way that advertisers can regain a bit of control from the networks, going live early in 2010.
This “currency” will be provided by Nielsen, but the UKOM metric (jointly owned by AOP and IAB UK) will still be partly wedded to the old newspaper world – it’s getting further info for an “Establishment survey” by piggy-backing the annual National Readership Survey (NRS), which traditionally asks readers about their newspaper habits but which has been expanded to ask more internet-focused questions of its approx. 35,000 survey sample…
— How often they use the internet
— Where they use the internet