IAB Aus Dumps Monthly Unique Browsers Measure

Online ad association IAB Australia has announced it will retire the 'Monthly Unique Browser' metric (UB) in the country as of February 1st next year, replacing it with the people-based Unique Audience (UA) metric. Nielsen will stop reporting UB within its Market Intelligence product.

IAB Australia says Monthly UB is no longer an accurate measure of audience - monthly UBs for the whole Internet now total more than 90 million in Australia - more than five times the active online population - and for larger web properties in particular the measure has lost any pretence to be a measure of the number of visitors.

The decision was taken by the IAB's Measurement Council with the MFA and is supported by AANA. The Council said that while monthly UB is most obviously overstating at a Market Aggregate level, the top five Publishers as rated in Nielsen's Market Intelligence (MI) have been showing a figure higher than the total Australian Active Online universe of 16.1 million people.

Director of Research Gai Le Roy comments: 'The Monthly UB metric has been used in the Australian market for more than 15 years but now that it no longer equals a person, it has outlived its usefulness as a proxy for monthly visitation to website figures and should not be used... With the proliferation of devices and browsers in use by consumers, the disparity between browsers and actual people will only accelerate'.

The IAB notes that the Average Daily UB metric may still be used, as on a daily basis the discrepancy is numbers is far less pronounced.

Web site: www.iabaustralia.com.au .

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