Techdirt. Stories filed under "measurement" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "measurement"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:14:00 PDT Nielsen Sues Comscore With Patent It Once Was Sued For Infringing Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110323/04095313599/nielsen-sues-comscore-with-patent-it-once-was-sued-infringing.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110323/04095313599/nielsen-sues-comscore-with-patent-it-once-was-sued-infringing.shtml "5675510") for the invention of a "computer use meter and analyzer," has now sued competitor Comscore over the same patent, which it eventually came into possession of after settling the lawsuit by buying the patent from Jupiter Media Metrix. Once again, however, this seems to demonstrate the pointlessness of the patent system. Metering and analyzing internet traffic is something that came about because everyone needed it and lots of people tried to tackle the problem. No one went into that space because there was the availability of a patent. People got into the space because there was a need and a market. And, now, Nielsen seems to want to beat the competition not through competing with better products, but by suing over a questionable patent.

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]]> destructive-force-of-patents http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110323/04095313599 Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:24:00 PDT Can We Come Up With A Better Way To Measure Innovation? Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20100326/1727008743.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20100326/1727008743.shtml quite some time, we've pointed out that patents are not a proxy for how much innovation a company does. In fact, research has proven this pretty conclusively. And yet, because they're easily countable, the press and politicians love to use the number of patents as a proxy for how much innovation is happening. That leads to silly articles from folks who should know better, making statements like "Clearly, the global recession seriously hampered innovation in the United States" because fewer patent applications have been filed.

But, that leads to a separate issue. If you aren't using patents as a proxy, then how do you measure innovation? Tim O'Reilly is asking for suggestions on a measure innovation metric:
How might we construct a metric that would reflect the transformative power of the web (no patents), Google (nowhere near as many as their innovations), Facebook (ditto), Amazon (ditto, despite the 1-click flap), Craigslist, Wikipedia, not to mention free software such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and friends, as well the upwelling of innovation in media, maker culture, robotics... you name it: all the areas where small companies create new value and don't have time, money or inclination to divert effort from innovation to patents?
The problem is that I'm not sure there is any single metric that really works here -- especially when it comes to disruptive innovations. You could go with revenue, but one of the features of truly disruptive innovations is that they sometimes shrink direct markets (while greatly increasing the size of indirect markets). So that might not be very useful either. You could go with user adoption -- but that may be fleeting or possibly gamable.

Even with older successful technologies, I'm not sure these kinds of metrics would most accurately highlight how much their innovation meant. Telcos made lots of money, but much of the real innovative value of the telephone was what other businesses they eventually enabled. How do you calculate that?

The only real metric I can think of -- though I'm not sure how one would measure this accurately -- is how much you would have to pay customers to get them to stop using a certain innovation. If you went around and surveyed people, and figured out how much it would cost to get them to, say, stop using search engines or email or mobile phones or automobiles, you might be able to get a sense of the "value" of certain innovations. From there, as a baseline, you could potentially monitor the delta over time. Thus, as the iPod grows in "value," the value of a portable CD player would decrease. As mobile phone cameras got better, the value of portable cameras would decrease, etc. It would be a lot of work, but could give you a much better general sense of innovation and how it changes over time than any patents.

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]]> the-market? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100326/1727008743 Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:58:00 PDT Online Publishers Still Having Difficulty Counting Dennis Yang http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071022/200227.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071022/200227.shtml difficult, at best. Most recently, Comscore reported a 9.3 percent drop in Facebook's traffic, which was met not by fears that the traffic to the super popular site was waning, but rather by explanations that that Comscore was likely under counting traffic from students who were doing their surfing from home during the summer. So, despite being around for over a decade, online publishers continue to have issues reporting consistent, accurate measures of their online audiences. Depending on who you ask, the number of pageviews for a site from one source may be double the number reported from another. To make things more confusing, earlier this year, Nielsen/NetRatings announced that it would no longer use pageviews as the standard unit of measure, opting rather for time spent on a website. As the amount of money spent on online advertising approaches $20 billion this year, this measurement issue is starting to become significant. However, this complaint about online advertising is ironic, since measurement in the other mediums is, at best, a crap shoot. Perhaps the problem with online advertising is that it, in fact, has too many numbers -- with television, print and radio, audience numbers are typically estimates. So, while those numbers may not be accurate, at least they're consistent.

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]]> math-is-hard http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20071022/200227 Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:45:18 PDT New Website Measurement System Just A Little Less Useless Than Previous One Joseph Weisenthal http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070710/054555.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070710/054555.shtml no longer use page views as its primary metric for measuring the popularity of websites. Instead, it will focus on the amount of time that users spend on the site. Obviously, there have been a lot of problems with the current system, as the use of page views grossly inflates the popularity of some sites, like MySpace, while penalizing sites that aren't refreshed or reloaded as often. As the above article notes, the new system will give YouTube a boost, but will ding Google's main site, which isn't designed to keep users around. Of course, therein lies the flaw with this new measurement system. Google is incredibly profitable and successful, precisely because it does a good job of whisking users away to other sites, either through ads or its search results. The idea of penalizing it because users don't spend a lot of time on the site is absurd. When it comes to TV shows, it may make sense to adopt a uniform measurement system, because all TV shows have the same purpose: to sell ads. Websites, however, have a variety of different business models, so trying to define a standard metric of success is going to prove impossible. Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of a site or service is its profitability, which, unlike page views or time spent, isn't so easily gamed.

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