The introduction of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's (IAB) online audience metrics could accelerate the decline of newspaper advertising dollars.
At a media briefing for the introduction of the long anticipated IAB/Nielsen's online audience metric, chief executive Paul Fisher said newspapers and print media had a troubled road ahead as online increasingly grabs a bigger share of the ad dollar pie.
Fisher said he expected online advertising to grow significantly, with the market to reach $4 billion by 2014. A great driver of that growth will be the new online audience metric which he said breaks down any barriers to entry for advertisers, especially conservative digital spenders in FMCG, retail and government categories.
Fisher said: "They said previously they didn't understand the numbers. Now there are no reasons why they shouldn't be doubling, tripling or quadrupling online spend."
The first set of numbers from Nielsen NetView showed Australia has an estimated active online audience of 16.6 million people with the average active user online for 46 hours for the month of September. Around 30% of the active online population was aged over 50.
The top branded site in September was Google and reached 14.3 million users. Facebook, Ninemsn/MSN, YouTube, Microsoft, Yahoo!7, Wikipedia, eBay, Apple and Blogger rounded out the top 10. Facebook had the highest time spent on the site for the month, over seven hours on average.
The new metric system aims to more accurately represent Australia's online population and its behaviour. Fisher said monthly unique browsers (UB) are not a credible way to measure a site's reach, labelling it a "ridiculous metric".
Fisher said: "Anyone quoting a monthly UB are not with the program."
The proliferation of various personal devices, different browsers and cookie deletion meant people were counted numerous times. In theory, one person could account for several unique browsers if they accessed the same site through a work computer, a personal computer, a tablet, a smartphone and through different browsers including Chrome and Firefox.
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