Internet audience measurement firm Nielsen//NetRatings yesterday announced a new service offering marketers a view of Internet user behavior according to content of the sites and sub-sites they visit rather than simply by URL, or Web site address.
Dubbed MarketView, the service, for instance, would allow marketers to monitor the demographics of traffic to the various sports sections of Yahoo, as opposed getting only a macro-view of the traffic to Yahoo Sports.
Or it would allow a potential advertiser to compare the demographics of, say, who visits MSN MoneyCentral to those who visit Yahoo Finance.
“What MarketView tries to do is aggregate things by similar content, and more akin to how marketers are going to market, either from a selling-advertising perspective or an attracting-visitors perspective,” said Tim Meadows, executive vice president, Nielsen//NetRatings, New York. “The content is much more meaningfully organized.”
Nielsen//NetRatings is touting the new service as a business-driven view of Internet behavior as opposed to a technical one.
The service is divided into three categories: parent companies, brands and channels.
A parent company, for example, would be Microsoft, a brand would be MSN and a channel would be MSNBC.
Nielsen//NetRatings defined a parent company as an organization, government agency, private group, corporation or other institution, which has controlling interest in the consolidation of each domain and URL within their company. A brand, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, may be a subsidiary or a parent company that has a consistent collection of branded online content.
The top 10 parent companies with the most overall visited collection of properties, according to Nielsen//NetRatings are AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Yahoo, Terra-Lycos, About-Primedia, Amazon, Google, eBay, USA Network and Excite Network, respectively from top to bottom.
The top 10 most visited brands are Yahoo, MSN, AOL.com, Microsoft, Lycos Networks, Amazon, Google, Netscape, eBay, and Classmates.com, also respectively from top to bottom.
Nielsen//NetRatings monitors the Web surfing behavior of a panel of volunteers and extrapolates.
