On March 1 xtraMSN split to form Yahoo!xtra and msn.co.nz. Let’s track the results using Netratings data. (Alexa does not have anything interesting, and I do not have Hitwise data)
The old Xtramsn site is now 1 page, which lets you choose between yahoo!xtra and msn. Neither of those new sites are yet tracked by NetRatings, and apparently yahoo!xtra will ‘never’ be as Yahoo! corporate does not deign to use foreign tracking services. msn.co.nz seems to have the NetRatings code, but no results are to be seen so far.
The chart below shows what data we have: Xtramsn.co.nz traffic disappeared, and was semi-replaced by xtra.co.nz traffic. The new xtra.co.nz traffic appears to be just the traffic to the xtramsn.co.nz selector screen, The big jump was on Friday the 2nd, whch is a day late, and may be due to some code changes. Since then about 150,000 UB’s per day go to the selector screen, versus 335,000 to the xtramsn site the previous week. Most people have made their mind up about replacements for xtramsn it seems.
Let’s look at PI’s – we can add these together, so the dotted line is the xtra total. Missing PI’s are playing in Yahooxtra or msn.co.nz, or have just gone straight to google, trademe or other sites.
Seek gets free links from both new websites, and has huge ads all over msn (the only ads there), but their traffic looks static.
Now what is really interesting is that TV3 traffic in red above. The news content for msn.co.nz is supplied by TV3, and if you click on pretty much any of the links on msn.co.nz then off you go to TV3. We’d expect to see a huge jump in TV3 traffic, but while we see that in % terms (below) – in absolute terms (above) TV3 is still tiny, which means that msn.co.nz is performing very poorly. No surprise given the shoddy website.
However in online TV land TV3 is moving in on TVNZ – the UB’s are around 70% (it varies a lot by day), while the Page Ompressions are around 50%. TVNZ is getting more Page Impression per visitor, suggesting people stick around for longer. However given that these are video sites PI’s are not great yardsticks.
So – we will continue to watch TV3, and hope to see msn.co.nz appear on the rankings soon. Sadly Yahoo!xtra traffic will remain a bit of a mystery, but we will glean what we can from Alexa.
Lance Wiggs 
Interesting stuff but I think it’s far from sad that Yahoo!Xtra’s traffic isn’t included in the NNR data. Hopefully this will indicate [finally] to ad agencies that there are other metrics options out there. Perhaps a little bit of competition in this market will be better for everyone trying to sell advertising online! :D
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I disagree – RedSheriff which turned into NetRatings is a single standard that we all (ad accepting online players) agreed and agree on. Rightly or wrongly. Confusing the ad agencies and clients with different metrics is the last thing the industry needs.
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Getting accurate stats from any counter seems nigh impossible. Alexa isn’t very good at all for instance, and Nielsen seems to undercount a lot. RSS feeds aren’t counted by Nielsen either.
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Accuracy is hard, as is deciding what it is you are actually measuring.
But again – the goal isn’t as much accuracy as it is common currency.
Sites that don’t publish their results (Zillion) clearly have poor performance to hide. See the ASA decision against Realestate.co.nz who tried to get away with pushing convoluted non-standard metrics on agents.
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Excellent analysis there Lance.
Cheers
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On the metrics question:
There are problems with all methodologies for sure. Plus there are proxy caches out there probably stealing traffic from all of us. However the purpose of consistent metrics is that everybody is measured by the same length yardstick. If Geekzone’s metrics are under estimated then so are trademes and scoops.
Personally I think PIs are understated and UBs overstated by NNR. But its really kind of irrelevant in the end so long as the figures are useful for making comparisons.
al
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