We’re not caving in on autorefresh
In 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.
“relatively clean of auto refresh across our network.”
relatively clean ha
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These are weasel words.
Getting rid of auto-refresh is usually as simple as deleting a line of HTTP code, removing a snippet of javascript, or making a minor tweak on the server side.
It doesn’t require “new platforms” or any heavy coding.
Please don’t assume everyone here is stupid—there are a few people with coding experience who read Mumbrella.
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Yeah, I loved the relatively clean line too… Not a great choice of words there Damon!?
But nonetheless, Y7 is, as quoted above, relatively clean.. You know what you are getting with them.
Can’t say the same for Fairfax, their video player on the homepage was automatically playing some Canon ad this morning, after each homepage auto refresh… If I didnt have sound on, I wouldn’t have known…… Annoying and weird.
And news.com.au just refreshes constantly, you can almost set your watch by it. Except you never see it coming because you’re already reading something on the page.
Think I would prefer content voids than auto refresh.
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Damon’s blue eyes means he can get away with anything.
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im embarrassed
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Complete load of hogwash. And Damon’d gloating over this I’ll advised collection of weasel words shows how shallow the Australian digital executive talent pool is.
Yahoo!7 had this on just to snare advertisers with their ‘performance media’ – i.e. Drop as many advertisers’ post-view acquisition cookies on as many computers as possible. Refresh, rinse and repeat.
Same as Sensis, who never got their performance product off the ground nor made enough from their DrivePM/Adconion auto-refreshing placements which made the jump to proper legitimate auditing all the bit easier.
And.. This is why Fairfax, Ninemsn and News Digital are still doing it.. they’re still successful at monetizing their auto-refreshed ad impressions and don’t want to have to fill the hole with a ‘more risky’ but legitamate business model.
C’mon Australia, lift! We can do so much better.
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“Cmon Australia we can do better”
Classic quote. I am googling what word exists that covers something that is more trivial than trivial.
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Love the ‘reason’ about difficulties displaying live stock quotes – as if you somehow need to refresh an entire page just to update a single number or two on the page.
On the bright side, at least there will be less auto-refresh in the world and with fairfax removing the auto-play videos perhaps the big players are actually starting to listen.
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