Is theglobe.com Using Phantom Web Ratings?

Computergram International, April 12, 1999

By Nick Patience When the theglobe.com Inc announced its acquisition of the Attitude Network's set of game web sites last week, theglobe said the acquisition would add around 2.4 million registered users to the 9.3 million it gets already. The figures were not credited to any organization in the release, but after a little prodding theglobe told us they were from a company called @Plan, which they assured us were on the big ratings companies and would get back to us with more details.

After repeated requests and promises over four days last week, theglobe.com still has not produced any evidence to back up its claims. Registered users and web traffic are one of the prime factors in putting a value on a company such as Attitude, where traditional profit and loss measurements seemingly do not apply. The more registered users a site can boast, the larger its potential for selling advertising and thus the larger its market value. We had never heard of @Plan and were unable to locate the company, so we asked around about @Plan's methodologies. Media Metrix, which last year acquired RelevantKnowledge, told us it thought @Plan used telephone surveys, but was not absolutely sure and Nielsen NetRatings had never heard of the company. Both of those firms use a panel-based approach, recruiting users either randomly or by selection, to install software on their computers that is used to track what web sites they use. That data is then fed through statistical analysis models to extrapolate the entire web audience. On the day of the announcement, Attitude president, David Rae told us Attitude's main two web sites, Happy Puppy and Games Domain combined recorded page views in December of just under 30 million and nine million visits, although some of those were repeat visitors. That's a lot of repeat visitors if Media Metrix Inc's figures are anything to go by. Its figures for February this year were way under anything theglobe or Attitude were touting. According to Media Metrix, Happy Puppy got 669,000 unique visitors in February and its second most visited site, Games Domain got 289,000. Even factoring in the other three sites, which get less traffic than Games Domain, that's a fair way off theglobe and Attitude's claims, given that by February Attitude was presumably getting more visitors and traffic than in December 1998. Attitude did not return our calls.