Internet regulator introduces more precise web measures.(Electronic ABC)(Brief Article)

Electronic ABC figures are being introduced, but will they help?

Perhaps the digital media market will come, in time, to thank Steven Laitman for the wake-up call he provided. Laitman, an unlikely master criminal described variously (and unsurprisingly) as "a cheerful geek" and a "computer nerd", was also the founder and chief executive of the leisure portale-district. Back in March he was banged to rights for falsifying performance figures for his company's main website, thus pulling the wool over more than a few pairs of eyes in the City and keeping his share price unfeasibly large.

Laitman was amazed he was caught -- after all, he only tweaked his actual electronic circulation figure of 57 million hits per month up to a claimed figure of 367 million. I mean, what's a discrepancy of 310 million between friends? That's a mere 643 per cent margin of error, after all.

The e-district site, you will not be surprised to learn, didn't have an official electronic Audit Bureau of Circulations figure. Instructively though, the scam didn't burn many fingers in the advertising industry, though the inflated performance figures did no harm in helping the e-district sales execs get their feet in the doors of one or two online buying departments. The ad industry doesn't necessarily use ABC figures -- electronic or otherwise -- as a fundamental mainstream trading currency. In the online world buyers tend to pay for delivered inventory as measured by the third party ad servers they use.

On the other hand, the ad industry would be ill-advised to be less than enthusiastic about last week's news from the international federation of ABCs. The body announced a global agreement on the definition of various "metrics" such as page impressions, unique users and a whole host of terms that people have been bandying about with impunity for years now. (A complete list of over 30 metric definitions is available at www.ifabc.org).

Is this a big deal? After all, we're only talking about semantics here aren't we? Definitions of things it would be nice to measure accurately. Does this actually move the industry further from its anarchic beginnings towards a universal and reliable trading currency?

Richard Foan, the managing director of ABC//electronic in the UK and Ireland, was instrumental in pushing through the new agreement. He obviously heralds this as a huge step forward. He states: "There are lots of significant things about this, not least the fact that the Internet Advertising Bureau is 100 per cent behind these new metrics. I think we have true standards for the internet at last. It's also important that these are international standards. It's the culmination of a lot of work and will answer ...