INTERNET MEDIA: ACNielsen rolls out NetRatings in Asia

ACNielsen is rolling out Nielsen//NetRatings in Asia-Pacific to track audience, advertising and user activity on the Internet. The new service, which aims to bring accountability to the Internet advertising arena for the first time in the region, is being initially launched in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia will follow later this year. ACNielsen media director Steve Garton said Nielsen//NetRatings will be able to rank banner ads and sites and compile demographic profiles. "Through Nielsen//NetRatings, we can build up a composite of Internet users in the markets we are studying on a real-time basis, so not only will we have an independent audit of numbers, we will also have a record of who they are, where they went and how much time they spent at certain sites," he told MEDIA. The tracking is achieved via a "super cookie", which will be installed in home and office computers with the user's permission. Data on what the user is doing on the Web will be sent by the super cookie to a central collection site in the US, in between uploading and downloading data streams. Several thousand people per country were expected to take part in the study, Mr Garton said. They will be picked from ACNielsen's NetWatch, a broad-based media and consumption survey. "We must have a large sample size because there are so many sites people can visit. This way even smaller sites will have a representation in the study," Mr Garton said. He added that there was no problem in recruiting people to take part in the survey because the study does not involve any effort on the part of participants. "We only have to install the cookie. The participants don't have to do anything after that. And, we give an assurance that individual activities are never revealed to ensure privacy, but that's a key ethic in our business in that we never identify an individual in our surveys."

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