Opinion

We’re not caving in on autorefresh

damon_scarr_yahoo_7_headshotIn this guest post, Yahoo!7’s commercial director Damon Scarr argues that the company had begun getting rid of autorefresh long before it became an agency issue.

Over the past few days there has been some commentary about websites caving in to agencies over auto-refreshing… although a compelling headline from those folks at News Ltd, it doesn’t really reflect the position we take when clients raise concerns like auto-refresh.  

At Yahoo!7, we have long been advocates for ensuring transparency in how we measure and report. We have always been relatively clean of auto refresh across our network. When advertisers first starting raising concerns about it last year, we acted quickly by engaging with the ABA about its audit process. Our Yahoo!7 Homepage and the core media verticals of Sports, TV, Lifestyle, Finance, The Hype (entertainment, music, movies, games), Travel and Youth passed the ABA Audit back in December 2010.

The biggest concerns raised by the ABA during the audit was regarding our Finance and News sites. The Finance site was rectified in November last year with the new Finance site (and technology platform) launch providing the ability to stream fresh stock quotes without the use of auto refresh. And it’s working, we took out the number one position for Finance within Nielsen last month on total (non auto refreshed) audience.

The News site index pages, responsible for displaying over 500 news articles a day will be addressed also with the launch of a new News platform. We hope this also helps drive our position further up the chain.

If this represents a “Cave-in”, so be it. Thank you! I hope we “Cave-in” a lot more in the future. At the end of the day, listening and acting is what good business partners do.

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