These days, Peter Daboll is Chief of Insights at Yahoo!  Once people stop laughing at that title, they realize that Mr. Daboll knows what he is talking about:

Before I joined Yahoo!, I was President and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, where we spent years grappling with the challenges of measuring a dynamic web environment. It’s 10,000 times more complicated than measuring television, and it’s only gotten more complicated in the last year or so, with the adoption of cool technologies like Ajax and Flash and the growth in video. They’ve changed the way Yahoo! and other companies are designing products for consumers, but they will also translate into page view declines.

All right, clearly, we’re listening.

In light of Yahoo! ceding the pageview throne to MySpace, Mr. Daboll is calling for a new measurement metric. 

Yahoo! has long reigned in page views. But we knew we’d eventually cede this honor as we incorporated more consumer-friendly technologies into our products.  And that’s OK with us, if it means our services will be better built for how people want to use the Internet today vs. in 1998.  

We agree and commend Yahoo! for getting with the times and leading the way.  We just think it’s ironic to ask for a new metric when the people investors, advertisers and decision-makers blindly turn to is comScore, NNR - who, with all due respect - have yet to fully grasp the nuances of online traffic.  Coming from a random bloke like me, you might think that’s a pretty ballsy statement, and indeed it is, but for six years I’ve worked online and for six years, I’ve been baffled by how wrong sometimes NNR and comScore can be.  The key word is “can.”

After all, there’s good and bad in everything.

Indeed, it’s a tough job measuring online traffic, but before calling for new measurement tools, we should perhaps see why our current model is somewhat broken, or at least not working.

The last thing we need is for comScore and NNR to introduce a new metric.  To me, these companies are reactive, not proactive.  They are historians, not soothsayers.

Allow me a simple example/anecdote:

As an entrepreneur operating in the video space, I find the dizzying number of different formats, platforms and standards hurting the growth of our industry.  Instead of working with one another, platform companies are rushing to one-up one another, leaving would-be clients/partners like myself holding off making a decision as to which platform to go with.

That’s my experience in the video space.  The same, I am sure applies to other fields.

In other words, we can scrap the pageview altogether (I am not a huge fan myself because publishers trick users into generating more pageviews instead if sending surfers where they want to go in the shortest steps) but before having the folks at comScore and NNR come up with another metric is not optimal.

The bottom line is that the page view has outgrown its usefulness. The industry needs to embrace change and develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately. We all need to help to wean the industry off the crutch of familiar metrics in favor of more accurate and representative ones. We all need to be smart about these new metrics — the measurement companies, major publishers, and advertisers.

I remember a quote by Albert Einstein, who said something along the lines of: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” We can’t oversimplify complex web measurement. We need more innovative ideas and execution to measure new technologies and incorporate user behavior into measurement standards.

At Yahoo!, we’re working closely with the measurement firms and our internal analytics teams to ensure we’re creating the most accurate representation of user activity on our sites. Nobody has all the answers, so we need everyone pushing.

This is all great in theory, but what we need in the space is invention or consirable innovation, not a knee-jerk reaction by NNR and comScore to maintain their grip on the industry.

As far as I am concerned, the notion of a panel of 100,000 members, or even 1,000,000 people is somewhat ridiculous when the Web’s worldwide population this year crossed 17%, or 1 billion.  The Web is far too complex, far too dynamic to rely on a historian to tell you what the future holds.

My gut says that the best and most reliable path lies in site-specific numbers, this is the Web after all.  I’ll spare you an additional thousand words, but if you’d like to see what we mean, read this:

Google is the Future of Web Analytics 
or
Opportunity for Google in Web Analytics.

I own Yahoo! stock, not Google.   Nothing would make me happier than see Yahoo! take leadership in the form of invention or innovation, but the mere thought of Yahoo! (or anyone who has been around since 1998 and having something to protect), NNR and comScore sitting in a closed room deciding the fate of online audience measurement reminds me of why I never pursued a career in investment banking.

This is the Web, it’s for the people, by the people.  Whomever than can craft a better system than NNR and comScore will ultimately win, much the same way Google did something better than Altavista or Yahoo!

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