The Audit Bureau of Internet Standards (Abis) this weekend released statistics for the page impressions of its member sites during the second quarter of this year, reflecting an average 19% growth.
Of the 21 member Web sites, 16 reflected increases in page impressions ranging from 2% to 71%, while five reported a decrease in pages accessed. The combined Web sites saw more than 200 million pages requested per month as an average across the three-month period.
The biggest gainers were Business Day and the Financial Mail Web sites, with increases of 71% and 46% respectively. Both BDFM-owned sites under-reported their first quarter figures by more than 20%, with Business Day losing part of its traffic data and the Financial Mail now having more pages available for counting due to technical changes on the site.
The next biggest gainer was ITWeb, which grew page impressions by 33% to just over one million.
Despite Business Day reporting inaccurate losses in the previous quarter, the figures for directory site Easyinfo were amended after a similar loss of data. According to the released figures, 15 days of lost data was added to the reported activity by using the average for the rest of the quarter. According to Abis "an adjustment such as this will be allowed once only".
The biggest Web site operator in SA is still MTN E-business, which runs the free online cellphone messaging site MTNSMS.com. The total of 132 million impressions reported by the site is seven times more than that of the second largest site, free Web-based e-mail site Webmail.
Despite a decrease of 11%, iafrica.com was the third largest site, with a reported average of almost 16 million impressions.
The only M-Web site to report its figures was financial site Moneymax, which grew 13% to 1.3 million impressions. M-Web has announced that it will use the services of Nielsen NetRatings to audit its usage figures in future. In the first quarter, M-Web changed its reporting from an aggregated figure across all its sites to reporting on individual Web sites separately, after it closed its various sites to dialup users other than its own subscriber base.
The move to ABC-e
After admitting in June that Abis was not delivering on its promise to online publishers and the advertising industry, chairman Jenny McKinnell says the future is looking up.
"During the past three months we have made significant progress in our goal of converting Abis into a credible, viable audited reporting body," she says.
The body is to include a measure of unique users in its reports as of the third quarter of this year. Unique users will measure the audience a Web site attracts, instead of the number of pages its users access.
The body is also to be renamed ABC-e, as it will function as the electronic arm of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the body responsible for the measurement of newspaper circulation. The committee which is to steer ABC-e will be elected during September.
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