"There was euphoria at the office," the former eFront president recalled of the July ranking by research firm Media Metrix. "We were having trouble raising the institutional money, but once those numbers came out, we got a commitment for a very large amount of money. It was a serious deal, with cash and connections, and it fell right into our laps because of Media Metrix."
There was just one problem: The ranking was a mistake.
The Web site aggregator's leap to the big leagues was based on incorrect data. When Media Metrix learned of the error several weeks later, it revised the monthly rankings--the only time the Net research company has ever had to restate its top-50 list. After the revision, eFront didn't even make the top 500 for July, although in later months it managed to crack the top 50.
The eFront case raises concerns about the soundness of the influential system that has become the de facto standard for counting Web traffic--important figures followed closely by companies, advertisers, investors and industry analysts. Although its methodology has long been considered inexact, Media Metrix rose quickly to prominence in the heady days of the Internet economy when traffic was the equivalent of digital gold paving the way toward initial public offerings.
Among the questions to emerge from the eFront controversy: How was the incorrect information submitted? Why wasn't it discovered before the rankings were issued? Have other Media Metrix rankings been tainted in similar cases that have not come to light?
"The whole system is set up based on some trust that the people they are measuring are not just making things up out of whole cloth," said John Corcoran, an analyst at CIBC World Markets. Although traffic numbers provide "valuable information," he added, "this incident with eFront... is not helpful to Media Metrix."
Media Metrix is hardly the first media measurement company whose numbers have been challenged. The Nielsen ratings, which extrapolate TV viewership figures from a handful of families surveyed, have been criticised for years. (Nielsen, in conjunction with online research company NetRatings, also measures Web traffic in competition with Media Metrix, which merged last year with market researcher Jupiter Communications to become Jupiter Media Metrix.)
Despite their detractors, Nielsen and Media Metrix have become widely accepted in the Internet and TV industries, respectively, as no alternative systems have proven more accurate. Unlike the TV ratings, however, online rankings can have far more urgent consequences: Traffic can be the fine line between a company's life and death in the fragile Internet economy, with investors not far behind.
Revealing message logs
Still, Media Metrix's revision of eFront's numbers drew little public attention until last month, when hundreds of pages of ICQ instant messaging logs between eFront Chief Executive Sam Jain and his correspondents, including some fellow executives, were apparently pilfered from his PC and posted on the Web. The logs, which read like transcripts of telephone conversations, include explosive and candid discussions regarding business partners, employees and affiliated Web sites.
But among the most damaging allegations to arise after the publication of the logs is that eFront intentionally misled Media Metrix to get the company listed among the Net elite. Although the rankings episode is not detailed in the logs, it has been the subject of many message-board postings and has been acknowledged by Media Metrix, eFront executives and affiliates of the company.
"It is what it is; it's obviously not a positive thing," said Stacie Leone, a Media Metrix spokeswoman, who described the incident as an anomaly. She said the company uses a 20-person team to keep track of and verify "roll-ups," or lists of Web addresses assigned to particular properties, on a monthly basis.
"Because there are hundreds of those URLs coming at us... they need to provide us with documentation that they outright own or have a partnership with the company that has agreed to let them roll up that property into their traffic," Leone added.
As the eFront fiasco illustrates, however, this trust-but-verify approach is not foolproof.
In an October press release, Media Metrix said it revised the rankings after learning that eFront "unintentionally submitted inaccurate information." But Ziegler and two other eFront executives told CNET News.com that Jain was responsible for submitting data he knew to be inaccurate. Jain denied the charge and blamed Ziegler for filing the paperwork with Media Metrix.
