The NBA Wants Global Web Users

Measuring Internet traffic is a messy affair. There are competing companies happy to provide the service for a fee, but their numbers often diverge so widely that you can’t help wonder if they’re just pulling numbers out of a hat. So advertisers are calling for (once again) some sort of standardization in how hits, page views and other metrics are measured. This WSJ article has all the details. But the reason for this post is a passage buried at the very end of the article:

    Ms. Spoonemore says NBA.com’s internal logs show that less than half its traffic comes from the U.S. Global advertisers she courts would be more likely to buy space on the site if they knew the extent of the league’s global reach, she says.

There was a time not very long ago when advertisers looked at that non-US Web traffic as garbage. No more. Companies want traffic from outside the US and will pay for some accurate measurements. Unfortunately, according the article “while the Internet is global, traffic measurement outside the U.S. is spotty. NetRatings now has panels in just 13 other countries, down from 29 at its peak during the dot-com boom. ComScore tracks panels in 33 countries, a number that has held steady for several years.”

It’s just a matter of time before these companies get their acts together and start measuring traffic from 60+ countries. After all, there are commercial Web sites now with upwards of 100 country Web sites.

Note to the NBA: Your global Web site still needs some work. According to our Web Globalization Report Card, the NBA site scored significantly better than the NFL Web site, but still finished in the middle of the pack.

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