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Numbers, Schmumbers

July 10, 2007 After posting about Netflix's Watch Now getting more web traffic -er page views to be exact - compared to competitors, I was taken to task by one of those competitors and rightly so.

There's been a lot of debate over the best way to measure web traffic and no consistency between different measurement trackers. Compete, which showed Netflix traffic way up and above competitors, measures page views, which doesn't really give any indication of how many movies are being streamed or downloaded or watched. (Yesterday, Neilsen/NetRatings said it would no longer measure Web traffic based on page views f= and instead monitor how long users spend on sites.)

Not only that, the download sites being compared, all differ somewhat in how users access movies through their sites, which also can skew numbers. Vongo, like iTunes, has an appliation that users download to their computer for downloading and watching movies. For that reason, users don't necessarily go to the company's web page time and again to search for movies, even though they may be downloading movies from the site.

So who knows who stands where in downloads. 

UPDATE
Oh but wait...I'm like sooo behind this week, I feel like an idiot. Netflix said Tuesday that subscribers have streamed 5 million TV shows and movies through Watch Now. No competitors have released numbers, so it's hard to say how they compare.

Posted by Jennifer Netherby on July 10, 2007 | Comments (0)