Look, Ma - no hands! ... And my website gets 80 bazillion hits a day

Growing numbers of Web start-ups are relying on Internet advertising as their revenue model. Traditional advertisers are increasingly allocating budgets to online advertising to reach an engaged, educated and higher-income demographic and build one-to-one relationships with them. Internet advertising has experienced some exciting growth in the past quarters and great opportunities, but there are also some substantial challenges ahead. One issue that is in need of addressing is the lack of Internet advertising standards, research and measurement in Greater China. The goal of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in Hong Kong (www.iabhk.net) is to address these issues head-on. The Internet Advertising Bureau was founded in the US in 1996 and is the leading online advertising association in the world, with chapters in more than a dozen countries. The IAB in Hong Kong is the first such chapter in Asia and is focused on evaluating and recommending standards and practices, fielding research to document the effectiveness of the online medium and educating the advertising industry about the use of online advertising. So: what are the issues, what can be done and how should they be addressed? The Story: "How big a budget should I allocate to online advertising? One sales rep at a 'Net start-up told me: 'Just go huge or go home, dude'. Is there some recent reliable data on Internet ad spending in Greater China to help me make a decision?" The Hitch: There is not yet any reliable, granular data available on Internet adspend in Greater China. The IAB: There will be soon as the IAB is presently undertaking an Internet adspend for Hong Kong for 1999 in conjunction with PriceWaterhouseCoopers that will be published in just a few weeks. The Story: "Which sites should I choose to include in my client's plan? One site claims it gets two million hits a day. Another claims two million pageviews a day. Yet another site claims two million visits per month. "Help! How can I make an apples-to-apples comparison so that I can put together the best plan for my client?" The Hitch: There unfortunately is not yet a universally adopted standard in Greater China for reporting of unique visits or page views, etc. The IAB: Standards do exist (visitors generate pageviews, which are generated by hits, but more on this in my next piece) and while the IAB HK is trying to implement them, it is also up to advertisers and buyers to demand consistent statistical reporting from sites. Once many sites start to report in a standard fashion, then all sites will follow. The Story: "OK, well if there are no adopted standards, then I'll just take the numbers reported and try to compare them on my own and then put together a media plan from that. Thing is, how do I know the numbers I am getting are reliable - I just heard that one new site is getting five million pageviews a day! The Hitch: While a few sites have undertaken Third Party assurance of their server logs to verify traffic, there is no established leader in the website traffic assurance space in Greater China. The IAB: Third Party assurance of traffic has already being undertaken by Outblaze.com and has continuously been done by Yahoo! in Asia. The IAB fully supports companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, AC Nielsen, and i@masia which are working to ensure that the visitors visiting and the pages viewed are properly reported. These issues can be resolved quite rapidly if the industry rallies together and demands that the standards be adhered to. In the next IAB article, these standards and terms for measurement will be covered so that we'll all be on the same hit, er, pageview. - Mr Robinson can be reached at richard@renren.com.

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