I noticed that NexTag is a top 30 ranked site according to Quantcast… the only problem is that when you look at the detail, and the large spike in traffic that NexTag has recently experienced, most of the spike is explained by them buying (and serving) more ads through their adq.nextag.com domain. I should know, I helped put together their adserver a few years ago…

But this does highlight the point that upstart measurement companies face a fairly complex landscape today where there are still lots of ways for publishers to “juice” their numbers and buy traffic. And as an example, filtering out the major adservers is easy, but determining URLs for homegrown solutions like NexTag’s is a much more difficult task to do scaleably. I recall many years ago when I was at Jupiter Media Metrix, the brouhaha that existed concerning X10 - X10 was one of the first proponents of the much-maligned popup ad. They were able to jump to a top 5 position in Media Metrix’s rankings based on millions of “visits” to their website by people seeing popups hosted on their domain. Here’s an article about that archived on their site (X10 is still around - if you want to spy on your neighbors ostensibly - and note the article is from the Industry Standard, in a nice ironic twist) .

The web measurement companies started filtering out things like this based on complaints that it was not representative of user behavior, popup blockers came about and further muddied the picture for companies looking to buy and sell traffic and count how many of these things were popping up not for PR but for dollars-and-sense media counting, and so on. This type of thing still goes on, but it has not been seen on such grand a scale for some time. The moral of the story: having to be right for everyone is difficult: sometimes it’s better just to make money and be right for your investors.