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News Ltd-affiliated realestate.com.au becomes biggest yet to ditch autorefresh

The anti autorefresh momentum has continued to build for Australia’s digital industry with Realestate.com.au becoming the first mass reach News Ltd controlled website to sign up for the Audit Bureaux of Australia’s digital audit.  

A condition of receiving an ABA audit is that sites cannot use autorefresh – where whole pages are automatically updated every few minutes – with advertisers potentially paying several times for the same set of eyeballs plus the associated ad serving costs.

The move by Realestate.com.au, which is majority owned by News Ltd, is the first time one of the big site owners has supported the ABA audit process.

According to the ABA-endorsed Nielsen MarketIntelligence data for October, Realestate.com.au delivered 553m page impressions.

Greg Ellis, CEO of the REA Group which owns realestate.com.au, said: “In April we embarked on an exciting journey which included the new-look realestate.com.au for consumers, which has made the site even more popular than ever. As well as benefits to consumers, we also identified the need to standardise the way we display advertising and moved to best practice in measurement and performance. This includes the removal of the ‘auto-refresh’ functionality.”

Technology house Future Publishing has also got on board with its sites T3, GamesRadar and TechRadar among those now audited.

Other sites to have recently signed up to the ABA  include the new Melbourne lifestyle launch Broadsheet and UBM Medica which includes Medical Observer and myDR.com.au.

Recent weeks have seen media agencies become louder in their demands for autorefresh to be outlawed. In August Maxus became the first to say it would not buy autorefereshed ads.

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