The company is presently looking for "warm reception" towards the service and needs to sign up 10 clients to its yearly subscription service to justify a rollout in Malaysia, said William Pulver, president of AC Nielsen eRatings.com. He emphasised that Malaysia was regarded as a "hot market" as there was strong support for the Internet, particularly from the government.
If ACNielsen eRatings.com were to succeed in securing the requisite 10 clients, the company will begin rolling out the monitoring service in July and would have it up and running by year-end. It is targeting a broad range of potential clients including financial institutions, governmental departments and advertising agencies to consumer companies, portals, telcos and ISPs, Pulver said.
AC Nielsen eRatings.com launched an ambitious plan in 2000 to create a global measurement service by this year. To date, the company claims to have rolled out its services to about 90 percent of what it terms the "global Net footprint". Its services have yet to reach a handful of countries including Malaysia.
With the dot-com fallout, the company admits it has been forced to adopt a more cautious approach. Pulver stressed however that the company had not curtailed its plans to establish a global measurement service. Rather, the company would "sound out" markets where the service has not been rolled out to ascertain the receptiveness of local companies to the company's information service.
To date, the company is already running measurement services in Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Taiwan and Korea. It is currently building panels for India and China.
Companies that sign up, pay a yearly subscription of US$19,500 and another US$5,000 as part of the start-up costs. ACNielsen eRatings.com estimates the roll-out cost for establishing a monitoring service in Malaysia to be in the region of US$1 million.
The company monitors Internet users online behavior, down to each click, transaction and URL visited via its proprietary Insight technology. Insight, a Java based application, sits on the user's desktop, collecting information and sending it in real-time to the company's data collection center in the Silicon Valley.
ACNielsen eRatings commonly requires a panel or sample size of 3,300. Panelists are paid between US$50 to 100 annually. Panelists' privacy is safeguarded, emphasises Pulver and ACNielsen eRatings.com does not sell any of the personal information it collects to third parties. Users can at any time, opt to uninstall the tracking application.
The company also measures Internet advertising and banner ad click-through rates via another proprietary technology called BannerTrack.
Pulver was adamant that the measuring of stickiness, visit length and banner ads was still relevant, despite the widespread pessimism that today surrounds on-line advertising.
He said the interactivity of the Internet, combined with the ability of technology to target advertising to demographics made it a medium that was ideal for measurements. "This service will help the dot com industry prosper--as the saying goes: you can't manage what you can't measure". He added that naysayers and skeptics of online advertising would eventually be proven wrong.
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