Online ad group sets new standards for publishers

NEW YORK: The Internet Advertising Bureau is set to release new standards for

online advertising on Tuesday, as publishers work to make their medium more

consistent and attractive to advertisers.

The new standards from the IAB, whose board includes representatives from

Yahoo! Inc., AOL Time Warner Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN network, aim to

provide more accurate ways for Web sites to count their visitors.

The drastic advertising downturn means it is a buyer's market for online ads,

and Gartner media analyst Denise Garcia said the new standards could be tilted

in favor of advertisers.

"The IAB might be erring on the side of the advertisers right now

because they are desperate for ad dollars," she said. "That the IAB is

becoming more involved and issuing all kinds of recommendations and standards

during an ad recession is no coincidence."

Online ad revenue fell nine per cent in the third quarter, according to the

IAB's own figures.

Spiders and bots



Many publishers currently count "hits" from search engines and
other sites, whose automated software known as "spiders" and

"bots" troll the Web categorizing its contents. Under the new

standards, a centralized list of such "agent-based" search sites will

be kept, and results from those sites filtered out.

"The single biggest issue is filtration," said IAB President and

Chief Executive Greg Stuart. "In order to be truthful to advertisers, we

need to eliminate that activity."

The new standards also dictate when -- from the time a request for an ad is

made until it appears before a viewer -- an ad is considered to be delivered,

shifting the measurement as late as possible in the process without specifying

exactly when the measurement should be made.

Unlike television, magazines and billboards, online advertisers know exactly

who is seeing their ads. But differences in standards can produce as much as a

15 per cent discrepancy between the number of viewers advertisers pay for and

the number that may actually have seen the ad flash by.

What consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers "found is that everybody was

measuring different points in time," Stuart said. "It's astounding

that the Internet got to $7 to $8 billion in (advertising) spending with these

kind of inconsistencies."

The new standards are likely to gain acceptance quickly in the

multibillion-dollar online advertising market, according to Garcia.

"They're all voluntary recommendations, but since the IAB's board is

composed of the top online publishers, it carries a lot of weight," she

said.

The IAB's Stuart estimated the standards will resolve 50 to 70 per cent of

discrepancies between advertising agencies and publishers. And although the

changes will cost some of his members money, he predicted publishers would

embrace the standards as necessary. "We know as an industry this is what we

must do to become a more mature business," he said.

(C) Reuters Limited.