Nielsen ruffles online feathers

Ad execs at Australia’s biggest media sites were handed another excuse for door-knocking their clients today after this SMH report hit the streets. In short, the curious alliance that is PBL & Microsoft remains number one, while News falls to the fourth slot as Fairfax fills in the gaps.

The biggest change comes as Nielsen moves from counting aggregated site numbers to counting traffic at a specific URL - and doing so according to the term "unique browsers".

At IDG we market individual URL traffic, and have done for years. It’s the best way to prove you can reach a unique target audience and preserve your yields. But when you’re playing ‘biggest hits wins’, it’s a totally different (and messy) argument.

To cap it off, the article contains today’s Bleeding Obvious Quote Award:

Kevin Walsh, media director of online buying agency NetX, said: "NineMSN will be pleased, so will Fairfax, but News won’t."