Tim Wood
Journalists are insufferable when they get into a crusading mood and I have been positively painful about the way the Audit Bureau of Internet Standards (Abis) reports its results.
Since its formation in 1997 I have been a long and strong supporter of Abis. It is an imperfect solution to measuring Web traffic, but the best we have in the circumstances.
That’s why I was almost apoplectic about a subsequent decision to include refreshed pages in the “headline” number reported in the media.
It was a permissive trend that could only debase what Abis was supposed to do provide a reasonable means of comparing the Web traffic generated by South African sites.
Abis has reversed that decision for the fourth quarter results. Refreshes are now excluded from headline traffic.
There are valid reasons to use automatic page refreshes, but including them in headline numbers invites inappropriate behaviour. That was all too apparent last year when sites that had once reported massive refresh traffic stopped doing so without a commensurate decline in page impressions.
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Well done Abis for doing the right thing, it can only help the industry prosper in an honest way.