“The click is a poor measure of audience, applying the same value to an attentive reader and a drive-by visitor. They’re also easy to fake. At one point, corrupt marketers hired armies of humans to increase impressions with their mouse, but now the process has been outsourced to robots. These ‘fraudulent bots’ are responsible for about 36% of online traffic, according to data cited by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
“Yet, since the advent of digital advertising, CPMs, a measure of cost per thousand impressions, has been the industry standard for selling digital advertising, which sets the measure of web traffic. Which means that, like it or not, analytics companies like Chartbeat have to measure impressions.
Can Tony Haile Save Journalism by Changing the Metric?
