Nielsen Media Research has thrown its hat into the Internet measurement ring. The Markham, Ont.-based media measurement company expects to have its Nielsen/NetRatings service up and running with a panel of 5,000 Canadian households by the end of the second quarter of this year.
Mike Leahy, Nielsen Media’s group vice-president sales and marketing, says the size of the household panel will double to 10,000 by the end of the year and that plans are already underway to add a workplace panel to the service.
‘We know a work panel is important not just to measure Internet traffic but more importantly for e-commerce activity, which is quite high during the daytime,’ he says.
Meanwhile, Nielsen Media’s competitor on the broadcast measurement side of the business, BBM Bureau of Measurement, launched its own Internet measurement system in Canada last November through its Comquest Research division. That system – Media Metrix – last week released its first-ever Internet audience measurement data, as collected from its English-speaking panel of Internet users.
During the month of December, U.S.-based search engine Yahoo! was the most frequently visited global domain among Canadians, with more than four million unique visitors. The top Canadian site was Sympatico.ca with 2.4 million unique visitors.
The results also paint a clearer picture of the demographic makeup of Canadian Internet users: 41.5% are men, 18 and up; women comprise 36.8%; while kids and teens make up the balance at 21.7%.
