ComScore has been rolling out the new system for months and says it can now use it to report on 25 percent of the 50 biggest sites on the Web. Another 50 percent of the top sites have agreed to work with the system, Abraham says.

ComScore lets publishers who are already clients participate in the program for free. But it will charge everyone else $10,000 a year, which the company says helps cover the cost of new servers and other equipment it needs to process the new deluge of data.

Gawker/Valleywag says it more bluntly “Comscore Blackmail: Pay Us $10,000 or We’ll Keep Under-Reporting Your Traffic”. Because the figures are consistently biased downwards in the legacy reporting, it creates a distinction in traffic reporting between those who place the tracking codes on their site and those who don’t, that is very correlated with higher ad revenues today (hence the idea of “blackmail”). Most sites won’t ever pay $10,000 so this means only the largest sites will even consider doing it, lessening the burden for comScore’s (probably not very efficient) infrastructure for doing so. This distinction in the costs to participating vs. not exists in a very different way with Quantcast, although the compensation and benefits a publisher gives up are a bit more subtle in their case since there is no cost for participating with them – namely that Quantcast will use their aggregate data to help marketers find similar audiences. By no means a small or easy task and kudos to Quantcast for taking that on. Reporting is one thing – but actionable data based on reporting is quite another.

Three points worth making, though this is interesting and there are many more to think about:

1) the “size = more ad revenue” should (but will take some time still to) become less meaningful, as more centralized inventory access and price discovery is possible. A good reason to work with three big sites versus thirty small- or medium-sized sites is that trafficking and setting up ad buys with people takes time and is grossly inefficient. And we’re all nothing if not lazy in the media business.

2) there is no doubt that the panel approach undercounts data, especially for the at-work and university-type audiences amongst others. I worked at Nielsen NetRatings and the most common argument we used if we ever gave any credence to these arguments was that most sites were consistently underreported. Hmmm yes. Of course. So it begs the question – if you are being trusted as someone to measure, report on and (often) opine on the health, status and metrics of an industry, don’t you want to be as good as possible which in turn leads to more trust, more business and more money? It is unclear in this case.

3) The capacity and desire for sites to implement a lot of different companies’ javascript code on their site is limited. Sites don’t want to break if any of these third-party pieces is messed up. Use firebug/firecookie or Charles and see what all is loading on the typical large site. Risks increase, and the infrastructure capacity of many of these vendors is far less tested than you might think, especially if the publisher is now being asked to pay for the infrastructure (another typical argument used by NetRatings or comScore or others “the market needs to pay high prices to help fund good quality measurement” which is also total BS).

CPM Advisors has been a participant in the BlueKai Certification Program, which allows marketers to easily define a standard in-market audience profile using BlueKai data while reaching audiences via their media partners, since September 2009. This new enhanced partnership helps reach desired target audiences by offering clients access to BlueKai’s in-market data on over 160 million unique shoppers online all directly within CPMa’s CPMatic (www.cpmatic.com) media buying platform.

“We’ve enjoyed working with the BlueKai team over the past year as they’ve continued to expand their data offerings, and we are pleased to now offer our clients direct access to BlueKai targeting data within our CPMatic display buying platform,” says Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO of CPM Advisors. “We believe that our cross-platform media management and optimization methodologies are uniquely positioned to maximize the value of their data for our clients’ display advertising campaigns.”

“CPMatic is a proven media buying platform, well-utilized by some of the largest online advertisers,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Providing CPMa’s clients enhanced targeting capabilities by means of BlueKai intent data is a win-win.”

ABOUT CPM ADVISORS

CPM Advisors, Inc. (CPMa) was founded in early 2008 and is based in San Francisco, California. CPMa operates CPMatic.com and provides optimized cross-platform media and data buying for advertisers and agencies, integrating with major publishers, ad exchanges, data providers, aggregators and marketplaces. The company’s founders and board members have previously built and funded Internet advertising optimization systems for some of the largest online advertisers. More information is available at http://cpmadvisors.com and http://cpmatic.com.

As I point out in a comment there, research I did at Jupiter (now Forrester) and presented to the FTC several years ago showed that over 53% of users used the same password and username at substantially all the sites they visit. I think the real number is probably still pretty high, despite companies doing a lot to force people to choose better passwords – because there are so many more sites and services that require account creation.

There are various pros and cons of Iframes (see here for a good overview some of which I summarize here), some pros include: Iframes don’t delay the serving of the page, typically loading in parallel with the other page content, there is no chance of name clashes with Javascript variable names if they are inside an iframe.

Some pretty big cons of iframes would include losing the referrer information of the page, which in turn means you can’t do contextual analysis of the page and more importantly you don’t really know where your ad has been running. Ads can’t communicate between each other if they are on the same page, so the coordination for wrap arounds or other things can be lost. You can’t run expandable ads (though some rich media creative companies like OggiFinoggi have come up with ways to “fake” expansion ads with iframes that is kind of interesting), which some users would say is a great benefit of these, but it complicates further the adserving ecosystem adding more heterogeneity to inventory which is now a mix of iframes and javascript tags and it is then unclear what can serve where.

As a demand-side platform helping advertisers buy optimized media, CPM Advisors (CPMa) runs billions of ad impressions per month across various advertising exchanges and we look at a LOT of impression logs. A lot of lower-cost inventory on some of these sources we have seen is hidden behind iframes, meaning most often the referring URL is that of the ad network serving the ads. As a whole, inventory that is served in iframes has a substantially lower price and underlying value than inventory that appears in javascript tags. The extent of the problem on any particular platform including Right Media is unclear, though I would guess that, excluding Yahoo! on the exchange, iframes might be 70 percent by volume if a fair bit less by number of publishers. There are obvious reasons for this, including that companies who would do nefarious things and generate large volumes of traffic often would hide their referring URLs behind iframes (and often, many nested layers of iframes running in parallel), but I do not believe the fairly young ad market yet correctly takes into account this trade-off.

Now there are exceptions. Some publishers like Amazon.com that work with ad networks grudgingly, purposefully put their ads in two layers of iframes to hide their origin AND to stop unscrupulous partners from “stealing” shopper-related data from their pages presumably – but as my other writings would attest I believe that the “sell the same stuff for different prices” world of online publishing will come to an end in the next several years and then this kind of good-quality-site-hiding-behind-frames behavior should be reduced – with the caveat that data use practices in a non-iframe world will also have to be more closely looked at, which I think will happen regardless. Are impressions a commodity? No, not yet but that wouldn’t be a bad thing if we had a real market to buy and sell impressions or “audience”. Let me put it this way – platinum and lead are both commodities but one sells for $1400 an ounce and the other for $1 a pound.

In tomorrow’s market-driven ad world, transparency will be more the norm and anonymous inventory will have its place, but on average will be discounted in price. Thus we may see what one might call the “iframe tax” – less measurability and accountability means more trust is needed which means more risk which means less money for networks and publishers that use them.

Hours of television per year for US Adults: 230,117,876 US Adults per the Census Bureau (18+) x 120.8 hours of television per month (Veronis Suhler Stevenson) = 27,798,239,421 adult-tv-hours per month, multiply by 12 = 333,578,873,050 television hours.

Television advertising dollars: $66,997,840,000 = added a 4% increase over a 2007 figure from TNS Media Intelligence.

Television access costs: $78,886,000,000 for all cable television revenue from SNL Kagan (referenced in the US Census Statistical Abstract 2009, Table 1105). You could probably make an argument about Premium cable and non-cable delivered premium services but then you get into online premium services etc. so I chose to focus on this figure instead.

The ad revenue per user television hour is thus the TV ad dollars / the Hours of TV per year = $0.20 per user hour

Access costs for television is Television access costs / hours of TV per year = $0.24 per user hour

Internet hours for 2008 for the US = 65,163,488,083 which figure was from comScore, adding up the monthly millions of minutes for each month in 2008.

Internet ad revenue for 2008 = $23,448,000,000 from IAB/PwC report, as is the split between search and non-search (45% is search for 2008 according to the report). From looking at these two numbers you get the online ad revenue dollars per user hour = $0.36

Based on comScore and Nielsen figures on the split between time spent with search (5%), we end up with 3,258,174,404 user hours for the year for search, and 45% of the revenue ($10,551,600,000) leading to $3.24 of search ad revenue per user hour spent searching.

Internet access fees were a little more difficult to get which is why my numbers were a bit more uncertain. I got from Pyramid Research a figure of $32 billion for broadband access but the dial-up and other access proved a bit more elusive so I guesstimated another $12 billion – so if you take $44 billion in access fees you end up with $0.68 per user hour for internet access. The figure is probably more if you take into account the costs of work access and so on, but we figured a $0.50 to $0.70 range is probably reasonable and conservative.

Anyone who has build forecasts and models knows that there is always uncertainty about figures even at this scale, but hopefully the analysis is interesting to people and draws attention to the job we have to do better as online advertising practitioners – driving user engagement with brands and products and making online advertising more effective AND useful.