I’m just telling it how it is. Real estate agents don’t care if tenants like the properties, as long as they keep renting them. The customer is the landlord, and the product is the leasing fees.

In publishing, despite what they teach you at journalism school, the customer is the advertiser, and the product is advertising space.

Note, I work in editorial, but the reality is that editorial doesn’t make a cent by itself — it’s advertising that pays the bills. And advertising is sold, partly (or largely) through positive stats. Hence my comment that publishers don’t -really- care about what readers want, as long as the stats continue to be good.

Perhaps I should have been clearer and said: commercial publishers only care about what the readers want as far as it contributes to positive stats that they can take to advertisers. That’s why we don’t see the kind of stuff that goes to air on SBS and ABC as much on commercial TV channels.

“Stilgherrian: publishers don’t care about what the audience wants, as long as the stats are good!”

I hope that you don’t work in publishing.

We avoided auto-refresh because we found that it’s annoying to the audience. Who wants to be half way through reading a story and then… zing… you’re sent to the top of the page. Or half way through writing a comment and then… zing… your thoughtful prose is gone. These are things that readers hate.

As mentioned above, Anthill scored ABA’s highest session time in November without auto-refresh. We scored that accolade by caring about what the reader wants.

But here’s the kicker…

Over the summer break we added auto-refresh as one of our many experiments (expect the full report soon). We set our site up to refresh every 10 minutes (while our competitors refresh at 3 mins). Our session times jumped fourfold!

We were already leading the pack and suddenly we had session times four times longer than our nearest competitor. And that’s just session times.

We’re about to crunch the numbers to see how PIs stack up but you can expect that it will be a similar story.

I said it above, I’ll say it again (but revised to reflect the News Ltd statistic offered by Smithee). Auto-refresh is like printing 100,000 newspapers, citing this as circulation, then throwing 40,000 in landfill.

Jerrys – With so much money at stake, a clear standard will emerge (whether it’s ‘golden’ or not, is another story).

Which is odd – considering server side logs are often equally unreliable – counting bots, not accounting for cookie deletion, not accounting for users home/work duplication, or dual browsers, or intl visitors etc.

Have to wonder whether the Comscore discussion (ie charging non subs $10k to include them in the more robust measurement pool) is more motivated by sites wanting to build credibility around server side or a legitimate whinge about a $10k cost.

Same issue is active here as far as I am concerned. Some sites quote MI (site side) and others quote Netview (panel) … which one should agencies believe (I use Netview personally for all numbers but not sure everyone else does)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010.....unch-face/

At the end of the day it’s only about display opportunities and only about big vs small. There is no one size fits all golden standard that will solve this, never has been and unlikely to be, it’s knowing what is being bought and each on it’s merits.

Sorry. I just realised what I said. What am I thinking? As you were.

As always in this discussion we have one set of publishers (smaller ones) complaining and digital agencies trying to protect the good name of the digital opportunity.

Any agency planner should be able to deliver their clients value with any site including any auto-refresh site. It’s part of what they do.

Standard ways of talking about counting are all good and have been around for years. If your planner can’t get the information they need from the big three then there are lots of opportunities elsewhere. Easy as.

Sites will always be innovative in white and black ways that will mess with some mistaken belief that all websites should be able to report their opportunity in comparable ways. Of course they can and of course they can’t or won’t.

Media buyers are responsible for trying to spend client money in the most effective way they can.

So it is in the online advertising industry’s interest to provide meaningful PI and UB (frequency and reach) numbers – especially if the media owners/networks want to get repeat business.

Q. Is auto-refresh usage more prolific in Australia than elsewhere?
Q. What benchmarks do other countries use to sell ads? (PIs also?)
Q. What auditing standards do other auditing bureaus demand of their members?

However in the next version of these pages we will give the user the option to switch auto-refresh on or off. This will restrict auto-refresh to those who truly want it and should address advertisers’ concerns.

Auto-refresh is a topical issue internally here as well (weatherzone). During big weather events, the auto-refresh drives bandwidth use to unsustainable levels. On these days we have on occasions turned auto-refresh off in order to maintain a decent quality of service. Yes, our PIs per visit are lower when we turn it off but not dramatically so.

My personal feeling is this feature should only be enabled when the content warrants it (news headlines, sports scores, weather warnings etc.). But having run our site in both modes for some time I don’t see it as a significant issue from a metrics or advertiser value point of view. We will always focus on the user benefit as the primary factor in making this decision.