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The quality of hits.
Seth Godin and Mark Evans are both talking about measurement.
Measurement is always tricky, because people believe what they want to believe and find the numbers to back it up. In both cases, we're seeing how advertisers and media companies are complicit at weaving a story that doesn't really hold up. How many "hits" did your web page get last week? And what, exactly, does that mean?
Yahoo's sites lead the way with 128.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. (out of a total online population of 172.9 million) while MySpace lags with a still very impressive 52.3 million. Google's sites attracted 102.8 million visitors (fourth) while the New York Times was the leading "media" site with 38.1 million visitors (ninth). So what do the comScore numbers mean? It's like accounting or polls: you can presents things in a variety of ways if you use different tools, techniques or methodologies.
Hits. Unique visitors.Both measures of quantity. But does quantity really matter?
My wife uses Yahoo! as her primary email address, so she visits Yahoo! a couple of times each day, but I can guarantee that she doesn't notice the ads at all. However, she uses Google to search and frequently clicks on Google ads related to her search.
So she is counted in the number of unique visitors to each site, but the quality of her visit to Google is clearly much higher than that of her visit to Yahoo!. And given the vast number of properties that Yahoo! owns, with only a 20% lead over Google, Google is clearly more efficient at attracting visitors on a per property basis. And this provides no insight as to how long a typical visit was at either site.
So from that point of view, even if myspace has fewer unique visitors, they clearly spend more time on the site, of a much more interactive nature.Doesn't that mean that a myspace hit has a much higher quality, and is therefore worth more?
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