Whizzbang's Blog | Standards - Part 2 - The journey to transparency | Audience, Iab, Measurement, Standards, Transparency

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Standards - Part 2 - The journey to transparency

Written by Whizzbang

Tuesday, 18 December 2007

It's been interesting seeing the reaction from many people regarding standards. I've received many supportive positive emails and also a number of negative emails questioning my ethics, ability and who was my mother. It's obviously a very hot topic!

waterinscale Regardless of the vindictive nature of some of the comments I keep on coming back to the point that:

1. To increase revenue we need more advertising dollars into domains.
2. To get more advertising dollars you need transparency.
3. To get transparency you need standards.
4. To get standards you need co-opitition (ie. competitive co-operation).
5. To get co-optition you need a public debate. This is why I'm writing on this topic now before TRAFFIC Las Vegas.

These steps of logic may be completely erroneous but I'll continue down the path until there is a better way to greater revenue and value.

Here is an extract from the "Interactive Advertising Beureau (IAB)" that outlines their views on Audience Measurement (http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/1421/1446).

Audience Measurement
The goal of the IAB and the entire interactive industry is simple: to achieve transparency in audience counts and to revise out-of-date methodologies.

For the interactive industry, one that is committed to delivering accountability, integrity in audience measurement is a fundamental necessity.

The IAB believes that all companies involved in audience measurement should be audited for their processes. These audits are intended to establish the source of any measurement discrepancies and to find potential solutions.

All measurement companies that report audience metrics have a material impact on interactive marketing and decision-making. Therefore, transparency into these methodologies is critical to maintaining advertisers' confidence in interactive, particularly now, as marketers allocate more budget to the platform.

Click here to view a complete timeline of the IAB's quest for transparency in Audience Measurement

As can be seen the IAB regard transparency as absolutely being critical to the ongoing development of the online advertising industry as they provide confidence to the end advertiser. The IAB has been down this path before and the results have proven enormously successful, it's time for the parking industry (including Google and Yahoo) to join together in providing standards that will give advertisers confidence for the domain channel.

I personally believe that standards for the domain industry are coming and it's only a matter of time. Ultimately domainers can only apply pressure to their respective parking partners but the goal should always be to see Google and Yahoo measured accurately according to reported standards.

What was interesting about NameMedia's Google and Yahoo contracts was the fact that both of them basically said that the Google and Yahoo can report or not report what they want to. This is fundamentally not in all our collective interests and pressure needs to be brought to bear to get this changed.

Wiki: IAB, NameMedia, Google, Yahoo, TRAFFIC - Please feel free to update and expand any wiki entries.

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Google interested in transparency
written by Whizzbang, 20 December 2007

I'm not sure your right in writing off Google. I had a friend tell me that they have been approached by Google to get involved with transparency.

In a future article I will try and tackle RPM, CTR and EPC. They will be a challenge! So far with what I've suggested, no parking company is being asked to reveal any secrets about their systems. All I'm after is the reporting.

...
written by btothec, 19 December 2007

Unfortunately with only 2 hot girls in this school they can be as picky as they want to be when choosing a suitor for the dance.

-- All joking aside, I think you may be able to get Yahoo to do this (not likely), but I do not see Google doing it. The reason I say that is that Yahoo needs the domain traffic as it has very little first party traffic on its own. Google on the other hand does not "NEED" the traffic to keep it's advertisers happy. They have more than enough traffic to keep the ad budgets exhausted. So basically Yahoo is the uglier of the 2 girls and she knows it so she is more likely to go that extra mile to make sure she has a date for the dance.

I do not think that the parking companies would do this let alone the ad providers feeding the parking companies --

Hell Skenzo doesn't even tell you how many clicks you received, only total visitors and revenue.

Why don't you start by getting the parking companies to open up to you and go from there?
Now as far as revealing all -- 100 clicks sent to advertiser, only 50 are paid for, how are they supposed to tell you why those additional 50 clicks are not being paid for because of fraud without revealing to you how they came to that conclusion? I mean they effectively do that now. You send them 100 and they pay for 50 and you assume the other 50 were fraudulent. How are they supposed to be accountable to an individual (the domainer) and still maintain some sort of an algorithm that detects fraud if they have to tell you which clicks were not paid for and why?

I am all for standards, RPM should be calculated from total impressions not from unique impressions like some parking companies do as that is already a standard. I just think that you are going to have a very rough and bumpy road ahead of you.

B

Transparency vs. revealing all
written by Whizzbang, 19 December 2007

I think that a number of people are getting confused between transparency and revealing all. These are two separate things. Revealing all means that Google is having to tell the world about their anti-fraud systems....this is NOT going to happen.

Transparency is accountability. A domain sends 100 uniques, the domainer is paid on 50 of them. At the moment we just have to take Google's word for it. What I'm requesting is that the Google PROCESS is externally audited so that we can all be confident that the drop is legitimate. At the moment we have no confidence in that.

The problem is ...
written by btothec, 19 December 2007

That the more transparent you get the easier it is to be taken advantage of. Google found this out a long time ago, and Yahoo recently decided to read a book, listen to an analyst, fire someone, hire someone, and start actually protecting there network. A few months ago you could see the max bid price for all of yahoo's advertisers. Now it is gone.. Why do you think that is? They are actually less transparent NOW then they were a few months ago. Well I guess the figured out why there network had so many BS advertisers paying network minimums and getting a ton of distribution. The bid tool, plus the suggestion tool makes for one hell of a way to beat the yahoo network. If yahoo came out and said we pay for 1.7 clicks on average from every IP, and we reset every 2 hours, all the scammers would go out and program this into there click farms. Who looses in this scenario? The Advertisers, which in turn hurts yahoo and google, which in turn hurts US! I will go on record here right now and say publicly that Yahoo and Google are NEVER going to be 100% transparent with there syndication partners especially the ones in the domain channel. I know you are really adamant about this, but it is never going to happen.

B

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