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Web traffic service hopes to sign up smaller sites
Sunday, November 16, 2008 By Catherine O’Mahony
A new web measurement service is seeking to sign up hundreds of smaller online publishers. Irelandmetrix is a system devised by Cork-based company Bluemetrix, which already supplies online audience measurement services in several markets in Scandinavia and in Japan.

It is designed to appeal to smaller websites, giving them greater visibility in the marketplace and enhancing their appeal to advertisers. Irelandmetrix will publish a monthly traffic report, detailing user numbers for what it hopes will be several hundred Irish sites.

Media buyers can then incorporate this data into a media planning tool also being offered by the company, which is currently being tested in the market.

The sites themselves can use the information - both to monitor their own performance and to determine where their audiences overlap with other sites on the system.

Liam English, the founder and managing director of Bluemetrix, said the system was not designed to rival the Joint National Internet research (JNIR) system, which was resurrected as a new industry standard for online traffic measurement in the past year. The JNIR has struggled to recruit smaller sites.

‘‘It’s a different methodology and we’re taking this a step further in that we’re supplying data to the agencies, if they want it,” he said. English said the technology used by Ireland metrix to monitor traffic had already been applied internationally.

‘‘There’s a value on smaller websites that is not being seen at the moment,” he said.

‘‘There are sites out there that might have only 50,000 unique users a month. But link up ten of them in the same sector, and you’re getting somewhere.”

Irelandmetrix is currently offering sites a three-month free trial of its services, but it’s understood it will charge €350 a month thereafter.

It has published data on 27 sites, including large players like daft.ie and Eircom.

English said he hoped to have 60 or 70 sites signed up by the end of the year.

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