What is the Value of Internet Audience Rating services

I've been buying consumer response on auctiion mediated media networks for several years now, and I must admit that I know very little about Audience Meaurement services on the net like www.hitwise.com, www.nielsen-netratings.com and www.Comscore.com.

Audience Ratings were important in the old days when advertisers bought OTS, or the Opportunity to Be Seen by an audience.

They're great-to-know and I use them in my presentations. I love the data I see coming out, especially from Comscore, is extremely useful at a very strategic level.

However...

The new world is different. Here "ratings", or measurements of the size of a website's audienceaudience measurement go flying out of the window.

As a buyer of audience response, I am not particularly bothered as to what kind of an audience I expose my message to (within certain limits, ofcourse). I am only driven by the Volumes of Gross response (as in Clicks), Cost per Gross Response, and Conversion of Gross Response into Consumer Engagement (the sum of all the actions taken by the visitor on the website).

In my previous posting, I had talked about Consumer Engagement as the single and only important metric for all brands - with the value in defining this metric as one or more actions on a IP-Enabled device.

With 3rd party ad-serving, Auction Platforms, and real-time consumer-engagement driven advertising, it is easy to operate in an environment where INCOMING DATA, not PRE-CAMPAIGN DATA, are all that matters.

The only algorithm (also called by me as the Google Algo)

1. DO WHAT IS WORKING.
2. SCALE DOWN WHAT IS NOT WORKING.
3. TEST NEW THINGS THAT MAY OR MAY NOT WORK

In a consumer-engagement-centric model, the advertiser is Audience agnostic, but Action Gnostic. If I can get males in my demographic to view a view and request for a Mobile-Coupon, then metric like CPM, or Unduplicated Reach are mostly academic.

If the need is for scale, then ads are contextually or behaviorally (See Behavioral Retargeting on the 247realmedia.com media Network here) sprayed in more or less random fashion with an intelligent iteration point. Bayesian based logical systems take the input data, the set of beliefs (what do we expect the click to translate into CE across a portfolio of media sources), and keep changing beliefs in a Bayesian way so as to get more and more CE for less and less cost per unit CE.

The beginning of the end for pure CPM Networks:

It is fashionable for media sales reps to say "we dont sell Page Views, we sell audiences". Well, I say, pump your audience into a Auction Platform mediated by a 3rd party ad-server, and give me the results in near real-time, I will spray ads all over your network with some starting solution, and optimize as we go along.

The better I optimize, the more I spend, so help me do this. And the better your System, the more money YOU make! Auction Platforms with intelligent 3rd party ad-serving are simply the most efficient way on the planet to maximize publisher inventory and minimize Advertiser CPCE - Cost per Unit of Consumer Engagement.

As a corollary, Networks which are not CPC and Auction-based, (like 24/7's Global Web Alliance), need to upgrade their inventory monetization infrastructure, or ready to see erosions in Yield over time relative to the market.

More on that later.