Hellooo, We Need Auditing Down Here!

According to Advertising Age a list of heavy hitter marketers are demanding third party audience data for Web sites. They will no longer pay sites for ad impressions unless they've been audited by a third party. And by 2008 they insist that online publishers have someone certify their processes for measuring ad-impressions.

This is easier for the big publishers. They have the money to spend to invest in comScore, HitWise and Nielsen audits of their sites. However, when you travel down the Long Tail of content, this is going to make it harder for bloggers and podcasters to generate ad revenue from the big advertisers. The advertisers understandably want accountability. The problem is, individuals can't afford to pay to have people audit our traffic. Worse, I doubt if even some of the blog advertising networks will be able to foot the bill either.

I am throwing the gauntlet down here directly at the feet of the third party auditing firms. On Adage.com this week I urged them to start giving bloggers and podcasters the option to embed their tracking codes into our templates so that they can begin to audit us. The time is right for them to open up to smaller publishers. Otherwise, as marketers demand greater accountability, the Long Tail is going to get left out of the media buy. And that spells trouble for those who are hoping to make money by creating content.