John Battelle's inflated numbers

Back during the last boom, boastful internet sites used to refer to the "hits" shown by their server logs, as if that was a measure of popularity. They glossed over the fact that every image on a page registered in the raw statistics, and so every single page viewed could easily add ten times as many hits. In 2006, there's a new fiction: that every feed downloaded, even if the content is never seen by a human being, counts as web traffic. And Federated Media, an ad network founded by one of the internet industry's most luminous luminaries and backed by the New York Times, among others, is guilty of it. For the proof:

Federated Media, which competes with Gawker Media in business model, if not directly, is described, most recently in a release by one of their partners, thus: John Battelle's author-driven network reaches tens of millions of unique readers with influential blogs covering technology, parenting, media & entertainment, sports and automotive.

At best that's just a misunderstanding, at worst it's self-delusion, and most likely it's a lazy boast they expect nobody can be bothered to correct. In October 2006, according to Comscore's Media Metrix panel data, Federated Media — which reps high-profile properties such as Boing Boing and Digg, and also included humor site Fark under its umbrella at the time — had an estimated 5.2m unique visitors in the United States. Hardly tens of millions. even if one makes allowance for international audience, and a few hard-core feed addicts. Here's the Comscore screenshot, with comparisons between Federated Media, Gawker Media, and AOL's Weblogs, Inc. blog group, for disclosure's sake.

Before anyone quibbles, Comscore's sample of over 60,000 people does include Firefox users, and it does reflect those scanners of feeds who click through to view the full article on a web page. Comscore Media Metrix is the statistical reference of advertising buyers. It's got its flaws, particularly in the measurement of smaller sites, but it's way more balanced than web services such as Alexa, and more trustworthy than claims based on unverified internal stats.

So, why should anyone care? Well, this is the internet's own version of the circulation scandals that have holed print industry. Advertisers are finally coming round to the idea that the web is more measurable than traditional media. It's a major change. Advertising spending is shifting online; ad networks such as Federated Media, which reps some excellent properties, can succeed just fine without exaggerating their audience; there's no need to fluff the numbers; it's just tacky.

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