Will AOL Charge More Now?

Nielsen/Netratings has just started ranking Web brands.  It does this by measuring “engagement” by total minutes spent with the brand and unique audience.  Brands that had a large unique audience spending a long time engaged had the highest score.  AOL came in first, followed by Yahoo!, then MSN/Windows Live, with Google coming in fifth.

If that sounds backwards to you, it’s because it is.  In fact, it’s basically the exact opposite of what we tell our clients.  Anyone in online advertising knows that Google has the largest, most valuable audience, period.  But aside from the obvious, there are three additional reasons why this new ranking system is potentially dangerous.  First, the measurements aren’t necessarily going to be accurate, second, even if they were accurate, it won’t reflect the value, and third, it might empower high-ranking publisher sites to up their rates without adding value.

Let’s start with reasons why the measurements won’t be accurate.  First, there’s the ongoing problem of cookie deletion.  According to Nielsen/Netratings, AOL had an audience of 91.6 million unique visitors in May 2007.  According to a