Tribes, MTV's ad network

Viacom's MTV Networks hand-picked Quantcast to measure traffic on its online properties, including MTV.com, VH1.com, Nick.com, and ComedyCentral.com.

Quantcast will use pixels and cookies to find the number of unique visitors, cookied visitors, and pageviews on each site. It will also provide aggregate user data for curious advertisers and measure traffic on MTV ad network Tribes, whose sites focus on music, movies, teen sports, gaming, and style. Tribes serves 4.5 million monthly unique visitors and 50 million page views per month, according to comScore.

More precise metrics are intended to help the vast array of MTV marketers, advertisers, and agency media buyers make more informed decisions about ad buys. What's more, using a third party to report stats will lend more credibility to the numbers in its online portfolio, MTV stated. (When companies report their own stats, they are often suspected of inflating the figures.)

Quantcast also claims to be "more accurate" than firms like comScore and Nielsen Online, purportedly because it does not rely on panel data.

NBC, CBS and Fox are Quantcast users, along with 80,000 other publishers. The number of publishers in its Quantified Publisher Program quadrupled since Dec. '07, and it garnered $20 million in new funding at the beginning of the year.