End of the Line for Nielsen Aus Monthly Uniques

In Australia, Nielsen says it will retire its monthly Unique Browser (UB) metrics at the end of this month, following recent announcements from advertising bodies in the country that the figure is no longer meaningful.

In December, IAB Australia said the people-based Unique Audience (UA) metric would shortly replace the UB figures, citing the fact that monthly UBs for the whole Internet now totalled more than 90 million in Australia - more than five times the active online population - and adding that for larger web properties in particular the measure has lost any pretence to be a measure of the number of visitors.

Nielsen says it will provide monthly UBs to its clients on request for at least the next six months, and that both daily and weekly Unique Browser metrics will continue to be available. The company says the proliferation of devices and browsers in use by consumers will only make the disparity between browsers and actual people worse with time. It points out that site rankings in its Market Intelligence reports have used Average Daily Unique Browser stats 'for many years' so there will be no change in the way these are compiled and comparability will remain.

The company also says it is developing alternative modelled online audience metrics for sites not reported within the monthly Hybrid data, and will give more details of this soon; and that it will shortly (April 2013) release device and operating system information on properties reported in Market Intelligence.

Web site: www,nielsen.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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