Shaking things up

MarketWatch places a figurative ear on the ground in an attempt to sort out the rumblings of an expanding metrics temblor, with comScore and NetRatings at its epicenter.

Buyers and sellers of online advertising are used to wide variations in traffic metrics - between their own and those of measurement firms - but the chasm has grown ever wider. So much so, that the Media Ratings Council is conducting a review of the two firms.

And now, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has apparently jumped in where others might fear to tread, having hired consulting firm Norman Hecht Research to take a measure of the metrics firms themselves.

Though substantial differences regarding unique visitors have been for the most part smoothed over, discrepancies regarding pageview have intensified.

The pageview is now on shaky ground because of web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX, that undermine the pageview metric, in part because they allow several applications to run on a single web page.