Netguide are running their annual awards voting. Liv mention this in her new blog – so I’ve dragged out this partially written piece….
As Liv mentions, this year Netguide want voters to register for some dodgy website (Netguide Village – not linked) that you probably have no interest whatsoever in joining. So Netguide’s business model is to drum up business by giving out awards.
There is a special category for non-Trade Me etailers.
“Best Online Shopping site… NZ-based site providing consumers with online commerce and retail sales of any products or services other than online trading or auction sites.”
Never mind that a staggering percentage of Trade Me sales are through buy-now (i.e. not auction) and/or of new products. I’m guessing that New Zealand biggest ‘goods’ retailer (buy new things now) is Trade Me, while I’m pretty sure that New Zealand’s biggest ecommerce site (buy a service or good) is Air New Zealand.
Netguide are owned by ACP Media, owners of Autotrader, Property Press and sellmefree. All of these compete (poorly) against Trade Me verticals (TM Motors, Trade Me Property), which leads us to at least one answer to the wording of that question.
Now Netguide are not as misguided as Hitwise, who have a domestic website that makes no mention of their awards (and that barely functions in Safari).
The actual Hitwise awards website shows winners in a staggering 160 categories – and it is meant to be based on Hitwise measured traffic. But there is a catch – non-subscribers can only win, it seems, in one category. So you get ludicrous results such as Autotrader winning the automotive category – when they had 2.9% of Trade Me Motors traffic (NetRatings) in 2006. The Autotrader result is the very first one you see (on a tiny text pdf) and there isn’t much point in going further. Hitwise are, it seems, following the 1996 model of giving awards to all and sundry in the hope of drumming up business.
So both companies give out awards in the hope of helping their own business. That’s ok.
Both also make it harder for Trade Me to win. That’s not so fine, though to be fair Trade Me is such a monster on the NZ internet scene that it is good to allow other sites to shine through. Even so, the Trade Me vertical sites in particular (Motors, Property, Jobs) should be allowed to compete fairly at awards time.
Lance Wiggs 
Choosing Netguide as the top IT media when it only takes the sixth spot in Nielsen Netratings is an interesting decision by Hitwise…
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Scoop.co.nz has taken the decision not to support the Netguide’s this year due to the approach they’ve elected to take this year. We felt it poor form that the page for registration lacked even a button or ad for the Awards that necessitated the registration….
This was one of two reasons….The second being the drop of a panel of judges to also have weight in voting….Reader voting only – will of course lead to only those sites with the greatest traffic volumes dominating – regardless of quality.
Perhaps Lance – you can get those free ads for Netguide (and Netguide Village) pulled from Stuff now?
:-)
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Juha, Hitwise’s mthodology is based purely on traffic data collected at ISPs, and on their internal categorisation of sites, which isn’t always accurate. Their categories are also quite poor in some places….EG: News & Media category is broken down into “IT Media”, “Print” and “Weather”….Certainly some room for improvement eh?
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You forgot to mention the ABSOLUTE botch up of an online voting form they chose to implement – I’d nominate that for THE worst online form ever!
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