Potential for abuse
Regardless of who was responsible for the submission, the episode underscores the potential for abuse of the counting system used by Media Metrix. Although the company maintains that it would have caught the discrepancy eventually on its own, it acknowledges that it discovered the problem after being alerted by a rival of eFront.
"In an ideal world, yes, these URLs are checked before the numbers are issued. But many of those sites are small mom-and-pop sites, and it's a matter of checking hundreds and hundreds of URLs, which would hold up the entire reporting process," Leone said. "In the case where they have so many partners, we might also do a basic spot check (of the URLs) and get most of the letters (from both parties verifying who should get credit for the traffic). I can't say for certain whether we did or not in the eFront case."
The research company defends its system and has not changed any procedures following the eFront controversy. "Media Metrix felt we had sufficient evidence to aggregate this site and report these numbers. Some of the information turned out not to be right," Leone said.
She added that Media Metrix executives consider the incident "a blip on their radar."
When it changed eFront's ranking, Media Metrix reclassified the Web site's designation from a "property"--a branded entity that encompasses other sites, such as the way the Microsoft Network includes Expedia and CarPoint--to a "domain." As a domain, eFront was no longer able to count traffic of affiliated sites, relying instead only on traffic generated at its primary site.
Yet the revision largely escaped major news media. Even after the eFront ICQ scandal, a Los Angeles Times story described the company as being "among the 20 most-frequently visited Web sites, garnering about 12.4 million viewers in July, according to Media Metrix." There is no mention of the restated rankings in the March 17 story.
The intoxicating power of such high traffic is precisely what drew Jennifer Moss, Webmaster for BabyNames.com, to eFront.
The company's concept was to sell advertising across a network of hundreds of small Web sites, many it had bought in exchange for eFront equity and the promise of three years' monthly payments. But Moss and other Webmasters say they received at most a handful of the payments and are now seeking to regain control of their sites. Ziegler concurred that eFront had trouble making payments to its affiliates.
Throughout 2000, eFront was rapidly acquiring an eclectic mix of Web sites with the goal of taking the network public.
The efforts appeared to pay off with the July top-50 list, which caught the attention of Salon.com. Last August, the online magazine wrote that the buy-and-hold strategy drove eFront "to No. 18 on the Media Metrix list, with 12.5 million visitors. The 14-month-old company is a huge roll-up of some 150 small content sites, ranging from gaming to tech news and loopy entertainment."
