Panel-Based Metrics Don’t Work for the Long Tail

About a year and a half ago when I first set out to promote Active Athlete Media to the advertising community, I thought it would be an easy sell. What national brand advertiser wouldn’t want the ability to reach, within one vast network of 100+ publishers, 10 million (and growing) unduplicated Active Athletes™ - tech-savvy, well-educated people who spend, travel and live for their sport(s)? And what advertisers wouldn’t want the ability to behaviorally target their respective advertising campaigns to each of these Athletes? It was a no-brainer, or so I thought.

Although each of the brand advertisers that I pitched liked the Company and loved the demographic, the truth of the matter was that Active Athlete Media was a start-up with not much of a history to fall back on. While we had a few brave pioneers who bought advertising early on (and proudly still buy today), the word on the street was that many advertisers would be reluctant to sign on unless we had the backing of a panel-based research and rating system like Comscore. Although I understood the apparent “sense” of security that such rating systems provide to the advertising community’ and their inherent wide-spread appeal, I didn’t and still do not believe that Comscore and the like give our partners, and other publishers within the Internet’s long tail, their fair share of the credit for the amazing audiences they generate. That notwithstanding, I ultimately bit the bullet and paid to have the Company rated by Comscore. Although Active Athlete Media now had a seat at the card table, the harsh reality was that having a seat didn’t mean that a fair hand had been dealt.

Every month since signing on with Comscore, I have anxiously awaited each of the ratings’ releases; however, despite our continued progress up the chart, I have been invariably disappointed by the 10-fold discrepancy between the numbers published by Comscore and our own internal tracking/reporting of our partners’ traffic and other related analytics. Like others similarly situated within the long tail, the unduplicated reach of Active Athlete Media’s network is not accurately represented within the market by panel-based research. Consider www.slowtwitch.com, one of our partner sites, which has almost 500,000 unique users but isn’t even a blip on the map. In order to give the long tail it’s fair shot with media buyers, who rely upon these research and rating systems, we need to enlist the help of trade organizations like the IAB, OPA, AAAA and ANA, as well as large media buying firms, such as Carat, to institute much-needed change within these systems that have seemingly remained stagnant over the past 20 years.