IAB set to move on auto-refresh
Australia’s online publishers are on the verge of agreeing a greater level of transparency over the controversial issue of auto-refresh, Mumbrella can reveal.
Tomorrow’s meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s measurement committee will discuss a request from the Media Federation demanding more information on when auto-refresh is being used on sites.
Mumbrella understands that the meeting will ask Nielsen to adopt a new metric for its web stats service whereby the data indicates which sites auto-refresh, and how often.
The IAB and MFA have been in talks over auto-refresh since the beginning of the year. The Media Federation, whose media agency members represent advertisers, wants to be able to tell what they are paying for.
However, the new initiative would still fail to meet the current standard set by the Audit Bureaux of Australia which only gives audit approval to non auto-refreshed sites.
The move by the IAB comes as business website Australian Anthill has published a stark demonstration of how it gamed its traffic statistics in a fortnight-long experiment with auto-refresh which saw its page impressions increase by 400% and its engagement numbers apparently go through the roof.
In a piece published today, publisher James Tuckerman revealed: “Earlier this year, we decided to add an auto-refresh code to our website for a period of two weeks. We advised the ABA that we would be doing so and the Bureau dutifully suspended us.”
The website was set to auto-refresh every ten minutes.
While there was no major change in the number of unique browsers, Tuckerman said there was a 400% increase in page impressions.
That issue is significant because of the way that online advertising is sold. Where advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand model, Anthill’s experience suggests that sites using auto-refresh may be overcharging advertisers by four times what they should be paying. And where (the minority) of sites charge for an ad to appear for a certain amount of days on the site, the number of pages actually being viewed may be much smaller than the publisher claims.
The average time apparently spent on the page – or so called engagement – also dramatically increased for Australian Anthill with auto-refresh. Engagement is sometimes used as a metric to persuade advertisers that readers are loyal to a site.
Kerry Field, who chairs the MFA’s digital committee, told Mumbrella:
“The key issue with auto-refresh is that in some cases we are paying for impressions that are not necesarily initiated by the user.
“Australia has one of the lowest response rates in the world. I’m convined auto-refresh is a major factor. A lot of other markets don’t practice it.”
A further issue, said Field, is that the advertisers pay for the ad serving. Particularly with rich media unnecessary refreshes such as where a home page buyout has taken place, needlessly costs advertisers money, she warned.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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It’s a rort. And I don’t think simply having it mentioned on Nielsen is enough.
Autorefreshed page impressions should not be paid for.
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Is this the IAB’s way ofavoiding an audit?
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It’s good to see this key issue not going away in a hurry after a small, but vocal group has persisted with it for 2 years.
The request by the MFA is a big step in the right direction and should be commended. But the ABA’s position is the right one. Turn it off!
This issue has eroded the credibility of the IAB and online media in general and the IAB’s needs to act so the industry can restore some credibility.
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pretty soon a bunch of people employed by the major publishers will be saying “we have to refresh the page to keep it up to date…particulary during the election!!” .
A reasonable argument and actually useful if the page is your home page. What they don’t tell you is they don’t need to auto-refresh the ad-space. It’s a good and convienent story to support the rort.
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Whoops, there goes News Ltd’s gains. Little Dick will be very dark.
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It will be interesting to see what the “move” will be. Let’s hope they do what’s right for the advertisers and the industry as a whole and stop auto refreshed pages. Identifying the sites that auto refresh in Nielsen is a step forward, but it won’t help advertisers who are still buying wasted impressions.
I echo Neil’s comments – this is an opportunity for the IAB to act and restore credibility for the online industry.
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Great point Stephen, there really is no justification on refreshing the ad unit. I can understand the auto refresh on a homepage or something that has ‘live’ content – it’s not necessary but I understand it. Some news publications though will refresh an actual article, sometimes whilst I’m reading it. I’m really not too fussed, nor do I expect an article to be updated whilst I’m in the middle of it and I doubt this is the reason it’s happening. It’s a cheap grab at more impressions that hurts the rest of the industry. No wonder advertisers are jumping on board performance buys when there’s this stuff happening.
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*Waits for Joel to release all the bees in his bonnet over this issue*
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A small step for the advertiser, but a good one. Maybe if advertisers stop spending with them and look for alternatives that offer a better overall campaign experience, then they’ll have to change the way they operate.
(Edited by Mumbrella for beign a shameless sales pitch) (User-Initiated views, Social Actions, Clicks-to-sites), so hopefully changes will occur. As a rule to date, we have kept away from sites that auto-refresh, as they increase our costs significantly, making the job of selling, creating and delivering on interaction a lot more expensive.
(Edited by Mumbrella as shameless sales pitch)
There are a number of ad-networks starting to offer these types of transparent and engaging services like Vid*ID and ourselves, but if advertisers keep running to the more established networks, they will keep paying dearly.
FYI – McLaren Media represents (edited by Mumbrella as a shameless sales pitch)
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Clearly a blanket ban is no good – a website should be able to do what they like – a good example being minute by minute sports live blog thingies. But auto-refreshing ad units? Yuck yuck yuck.
In conjunction with post-impression cookies just another demonstration of how clients are taken advantage of by the less reputable media agencies. I’ve seen agencies promoting 90 day post-impression cookies, and then claiming a CPA for those banners. Banners the customer may never have even glimpsed.
Can someone explain why the engagement metric (or the time spent on site, per user) increases with auto refresh? I’m assuming it’s because Google analytics only counts you as being on the site if you perform an action every x minutes, rather than leaving a tab open in the background?
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Whilst I represent the buyer-side of the equation in this debate, I actually see genuine uses for Auto-Refresh. Very limited, but genuine uses, These would include news, stocks, sports etc.
If I was a publisher of content in which currency was of utmost importance I’d be might pissed off if a measurement system dictated what I could and couldn’t do. At the core of all these rules the consumer has to be #1 – ahead of even the advertiser or media owner.
So, this creates a dilemma. The proposed course of action will highlight in the audience measurement software sites that use AR and details of that usage – that is, it’s use will not be banned but it will sure be highlighted. It is then up to the marketplace to decided whether AR use is valid for that site, and if the buyer feels it is a rort simply buy space on sites that don’t use AR. (Though one of the mysteries is why AR is banned in the US but used here by several publishers).
Of course, there are other potential ‘solutions’, such as requiring that all pages that a publisher believes needs refreshing be written in a combination of either an HTML or JS frame to support the measurement tag, but that all ‘refreshable content’ on that page be delivered via AJAX or similar. Again, this is the measurement system leading the market which is far from ideal.
Should the MFA recommendation be accepted and approved, one would hope that sites that do not get a clean bill of health (i.e. don’t get the green tick) would quickly recode pages that require refreshing so that they do get the tick.
We also have to clearly distinguish between AR of content and AR of ads. If a page is refreshed and the ad isn’t, there are still problems cost-wise (though not as bad as the cost implications of having the same ad refreshed and paid for again), in that many buying decisions are based on PIs and the use of AR needlessly inflates PIs and makes that site look more favourable when the PI data is in fact incomparable.
This has been a VERY tricky issue and has taken a lot of time – more than it should have. Of course I would say that FULL DISCLOSURE of the use of AR is the sensible middle ground between the AR rorts we have all witnessed and the outright banning of AR as I was part of that recommendation. But being the optimist I am, I hope that reporting its usage will lead to publishers investing in ways to ensure that page and ad AR is no longer needed due to superior technical solutions and that AR becomes a non-issue in the not too distant future.
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@Tim – I didn’t know that being 100% transparent was shameless. Is this a micro-form of internet filtering Mr Conroy? I say let the public decide.
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The action over the last 3 months seems encouraging. Looking forward to seeing the outcomes.
You say transparent, I say not-very-relevant crowbarring of your product into the conversation…
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
@Tim again – That response actually made me laugh..So thank you.
Well! seeing that this thread is dead, no point arguing on the point of filtering based on perception.
However in my defence, I would only say that 1 point was a shameless plug….The video! The rest clearly outlined who we were and how it affects our business, like it affects others above. To tone it down, maybe these would have sufficed;
Firstly, I think there is an ‘n’ in benign – “(Edited by Mumbrella for beign a shameless sales pitch)”
Maybe this should have read – “For ad-networks that buy on an impression basis and resell Simple, Rich or Video media on a performance basis……
The second one showcased a video that people would see this in action, and could quite easily be considered a sales pitch from some people. Others would get a visual on what I had just outlined.
The last was making a claim that we were linked to the video…as to be 100% transparent.
All-in-all, conversations about AR will benefit a large number of advertisers and ad-networks, whilst some publishers may lose quite a bit.
Interesting to see the results.
Cheers – Grant
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Grant, your argument structure has a striking resemblance to Steve Fielding.
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