Urban List accused of misleading advertisers with press release about audience size
Lifestyle publisher Time Out has criticised rival The Urban List after it used the wrong metric to claim it had topped the lifestyle category in the Nielsen online rankings.
The Urban List had issued a release to the media claiming it had a monthly audience of more than 1.31m unique browsers which meant it reached “25 per cent more urban Australians when compared with category peers Broadsheet, Time Out and Concrete Playground”.
However Nielsen has confirmed it was making those claims on the basis of the wrong numbers, and should have reported unique audience, not unique browser figures.
Time Out digital director Julian Peterson told Mumbrella: “A number of Time Out copycats regularly release incorrect or selective figures claiming a bigger audience than us. At best this shows a complete lack of understanding of digital audiences, at worst it is a deliberate attempt to mislead advertisers.”
That’s embarrassing
According to the above, Urban List’s 1,310,000 UBS only consist of a Unique Audience of 195,000. So Nielsen are reporting that the average Urban Lister accesses the website on an average of 6.6 different devices, am I reading into this wrong? No way that’s correct, I’d bet it’s more a reflection of Nielsen’s limited audience capture/panelling methods.
Shots Fired!
@D Nevertheless D – apples with apples rather than bs interpretation of apples?
Nielsen’s panel simply cannot measure the audience of smaller sites; the UB to unique audience ratio says it all. It’s just wrong.
Nielsen should use these moments to honestly update the market of the limitations it has with a small panel to extrapolate audience to smaller sites.
Oh dear.
I gave up on Monthly Unique Browsers when the Australian market hit 133 million. That was around a decade ago. It’s stunning that some people are still using them.
@D – you sort of are. UBs rely on cookies. So if you clear your cookies (as many security software packages do each week), then you appear as a new UB.
Let’s use a simple example of a person who runs Norton each week and clears cookies, and accesses (say) smh.com.au daily both at work on their desktop and at home on their laptop. In the first week, they would appear as two UBs. The following week with the cookies cleared they would appear as another two UBs. Same goes for the third and fourth week of the month. So in this simple example the monthly UBs would be 8 for the one person.
Throw in a smartphone and a tablet and you get an idea of the magnitude of the problem.
Of course it is a LOT more complicated than that, but if you follow that example you’d know why Monthly UBs is probably the bluntest statistic ever foisted upon a medium.
@D
P.S. It is the Nielsen panel that is able to report the incidence and level of cookie deletion, multiple site usage, multiple device usage, multiple persons per device (e.g. connected TV) that allows ‘audience’ to be reported.
So your last comment is more a reflection of your knowledge and experience of audience measurement I suspect.
@Zac. You are correct that the Nielsen panel (alone) cannot measure very small sites accurately But Zac, you should talk to your Nielsen rep and catch up with the way the Nielsen system now operates – utilising traffic data, Facebook calls etc. I’d hazard a guess that FB is bascially a sample of one in two these days.
@John Grono
Thanks for the explanation, it’s pleasantly simple. We as a Media network have bought up the sizable difference between our client sites UAs and UBs numbers on many occasions with our Nielsen rep. Cookie deletion detection has NEVER been offered up as part of an explanation, but it makes sense now I think about it. Seems like this is a reflection of our rep’s knowledge as opposed to a data collecting flaw. So you’ve actually cleared this up for us. Cheers!
So @D in view of that, no doubt you agree that the number of 1,310,000 unique browsers is massively overstating the audience and not helpful to anyone thinking of advertising on Urban List?
You seem to be passing the blame for this to Nielsen rather than Urban List – do you work at the latter? (You said “Urban Lister” so I thought you might?)
The Urban List are genuinely trying to mislead and deceive their clients and agencies, and their media kit is a prime example. This graph, taken straight from their current media kit, is wildly out of scale and seriously insults the intelligence of every media planner or marketer that receives this: http://prntscr.com/9cam5a
(The figures are also for all traffic, not desktop as The Urban List has labelled).
Worse, earlier in 2015 they were quoting Google Analytics figures (from September 2014!!) from their competitors in their media kit: http://prntscr.com/9cahkt
In any other industry, you better make damn sure that if you publish anything about a competitor, it’s factually correct. Why does Susannah George think that the same rules don’t apply to digital publishing?
@Anonymous
Totally agree with you here mate, 1,310,000 isn’t an accurate reflection of their audience size. However, I don’t think they ever claimed 1,310,000 UAs?
And again, I’m perhaps an optimist and showing faith that when Urban List release statements to the market like, we reach “25 per cent more urban Australians when compared with category peers Broadsheet, Time Out and Concrete Playground”, they’re comparing their UB count to their competitors UB count. Like for like.
If they’re comparing their device inflated UBs to their competitors de-duplicated UA numbers then that’s obviously not only misleading but totally incorrect. Publically shame away!
I don’t work for Urbanspoon, and I definitely don’t mean to rant at Nielsen ( we all have to use them) I just happened to read this particular Mumbrella post at a time when our Media network is working with a number of our smaller Publishers through their own concerns regarding audience size variation between GA, Nielsen MI and the newer Nielsen UA metrics. And like one of the posters above, we’re frustrated with the explanations when applying these measurements to the smaller <25K UA sites within our network.
@ Plain unethical – interesting to see Urban List quoting everyone else’s Google Analytics figures to advertisers.
How did they actually get everyone’s Google Analytics figures?