The New York Times ran an article, In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them, that explains how web traffic counts have been inflated when pop up or pop under ads bring up content from the originating site. I.e., the popup is a page from Entrepreneur.com, which ends up counting as a pageview and a visit for that site. I didn’t choose Entrepreneur.com by accident - they had their Nielsen unique visitor counts for last April cut from 7.6 million to 2 million. Nielsen found that a large portion of their so-called visits were from Web users who had pop unders from Entrepreneur.com delivered on another website.
Is this really breaking news? Weren’t the Nielsen people around a few years ago when X10.com, the original pop under king, was a top 5 website? X10, purveyor of low end home automation and video cameras, saturated the web with pop unders hawking surveillance cams and usually featuring models who often looked like their day job involved wearing fewer clothes. Needless to say, they got their top 5 ranking by pushing their pages onto PCs from other sites. (Want a blast from the past? You can visit X10.com even today for a full dose of jiggling ads, blinking ads, cheesy babes selling video cams, and other stuff reminiscent of the good old days of web advertising.
There IS a silver lining in this cloud for Entrepreneur.com. They picked up a nice link from NYTimes.com, not to mention any syndicated copies and the inevitable follow-on stories from at other sites. Plus, of course, the blog articles (except this one).
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