MLBAM Arranging Meeting Between Omniture and Audit Bureau Circulations' Over Web Traffic Discrepancies

MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman, speaking yesterday in a keynote address before the Audit Bureau of Circulations' (ABC) annual conference in Chicago, called on the industry group to help establish better reporting standards for Internet traffic. Bowman and MLBAM have been locked in a lengthy dispute with Nielsen Online over panel-based measurement methods baseball’s interactive arm claims drastically underreports actual audience visits to most Web sites, including MLB.com. “We’re getting better acknowledgement that the current system is simply horrendous and rife with massive errors,” Bowman said. “So the question I posed is whether the ABC can do what they’ve done for newspapers, other periodicals, in developing a reliable audit-based system, one that’s relatively inexpensive, accessible, and importantly, one that will be embraced and supported by the advertising community. I sensed a great deal of sympathy, so we’ll see where it goes.” Bowman said he is planning to arrange a meeting between ABC officials and Omniture, which helps monitor MLBAM’s internal server-based traffic counts, to review MLBAM’s data and perhaps develop a trial system that can be implemented more broadly.