In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, mainstream America first became acquainted with Huffington Post (aka Huff Post), the popular news aggregator and commentary site. The site featured a swirl of real-time news and analysis that fed the addiction of news junkies (like myself) interested in reading anything and everything about the election.

comScore reported that the site had reached new highs in October 2008 when it drew 5 million visitors, which was not altogether surprising with the election reaching a fever pitch. But, like many in the news media, I expected that Huff Post’s audience would come back down to earth after the election.

Only that didn’t happen…

The peak coverage of the election season was reached in October 2008, and as anticipated the two subsequent months saw traffic pull back to around 4 million visitors a month. However, defying the expectations, traffic soon picked back up beginning in January as the number of visitors soared past its previous high to 5.4 million. And the site managed to sustain this growth, with three out of the first four months of 2009 attracting more visitors than the October peak. April 2009 represented an all-time high for Huff Post with 5.6 million visitors.

This clear undercurrent of growth at the site suggests that there may be an emerging trend in how Americans consume news. With so many disparate news sources available online, it can be difficult to keep up with the best of what’s available and news aggregators like Huff Post offer links to the day’s most interesting stories.

With print readership of newspapers declining, a concern among the industry is whether or not these news aggregators will cannibalize newspapers’ digital business. While it may be difficult to know conclusively whether or not this is the case, I found one piece of evidence suggesting that Huffington Post might in fact encourage online newspaper consumption. comScore data revealed that the average online newspaper reader spends an average of 26.2 minutes consuming online newspaper content each month, but the average reader of Huff Post spends 55.5 minutes doing so. So there is significantly heavier online newspaper consumption among those who visit Huffington Post.

Of course, it would be unfair to assume that this correlation necessarily implied causation (after all, Huff Post readers might be inherently heavier online newspaper readers than the average category visitor), but the stark difference does at least suggest that the site just might play some role in driving more consumption of online newspapers. If that’s the case, then newspapers ought to be devising strategies to get their content front and center on news aggregators, because in all likelihood they are only going to get bigger with time.

The downside risk of such a strategy is that if people become more dependent on news aggregators, they could stop visiting online newspapers as a primary source of news. Will the once-loyal New York Times reader begin visiting a site like Huffington Post for his first glance at today’s news in lieu of the NYTimes.com homepage? So as these news aggregators gain prominence, it will be interesting to monitor whether or not they have an effect on existing online news consumption habits.

This of course forces newspapers to walk a fine line: how to get content distributed as widely as possible without losing the eyeballs of your regular readers? Ultimately, I suspect the newspapers will have to strike a healthy balance with the aggregators, enabling them to feature content while policing how much of that content can be repurposed before linking to the full story. I also believe that as this new digital news paradigm emerges, there will be a renewed emphasis on writing talent, content quality, in-depth analysis and investigative journalism – the real differentiators for news today. The news brands that choose to focus on these elements will not only be able to survive the current landscape but will find their way to new and valuable audiences across geographies that they never before would have reached. With the right strategy, the newspapers just might find a useful ally in the news aggregators.

Last Monday I spoke to a packed room at Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit in New York, where I announced comScore’s new digital audience measurement initiative, Media Metrix 360.

I’ve known John Battelle for many years and was delighted to announce this initiative at his conference and receive his support. John said, “As one of its first participants, Federated Media is firmly in support of comScore’s Media Metrix 360 measurement initiative. This new hybrid approach represents a critically important evolution in online audience measurement, especially for publishers and content networks, by better accounting for niche audiences, distributed content and the mobile environment. We view it as an important leap forward for the industry.”

Media Metrix 360 will offer a best-of-breed approach to digital measurement that continues to revolve around measuring what matters most to the online advertising industry – people. This ‘panel-centric hybrid’ solution combines person-level measurement from comScore’s proprietary 2 million person global panel with Web site server metrics in order to account for 100 percent of a Web site’s audience.

Even in the initial stages of implementation of the total system, we already have server-side coverage of over 80 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience, or approximately 160 million people. And we have observed 400 million unique comScore cookies among this group of users in a month. There are two quick points I’d like to make about these facts. The first is that if we do the math (400 million cookies/160 million people) it equates to approximately 2.5 unique cookies per person. If that number sounds at all familiar to you, it might be because that was the same cookie inflation factor we identified in our 2007 study of cookie deletion rates. The second point I will highlight is that the phenomenon of cookie deletion ends up creating many more unique cookies than there are Internet users. Put another way, cookies alone cannot be used to accurately count unique visitors to a web site. The use of cookies inevitably leads to an overstatement of the actual visitor base.

After my presentation I received a number of interesting and insightful questions concerning our new measurement initiative. I’ll share the most interesting one with you.

Will this initiative enable comScore to perform deeper analysis on individual advertising campaigns?
Yes, the integration of the highly granular server data with the understanding of the characteristics of the people exposed to a particular campaign (that only panel data can provide) will enable an unparalleled understanding of campaign performance. We will be able to view the actual delivery of ad campaigns faster and in great detail, which will ultimately result in more actionable analysis and the design of more effective online media plans.

Finally, we’ve received many inquiries and requests for the slides from my presentation since our announcement, so I’d like to invite you to download them here if you are interested in finding out more about comScore’s industry-changing initiative.

comScore’s paper “Whither the Click”, which reveals the significant positive impact of display ads even when there’s no click, is being published in this month's issue of the Journal of Advertising Research.

The results have also been cited in a very interesting article authored by Hernan Lopez, president of .Fox Networks and chief operating officer of Fox International Channels, which has just been published in the global issue of Advertising Age: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137246

I think Hernan has written an important piece and I wanted to share it with you here.

Last week, I spoke at the fifth annual Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Boston. In spite of the continued uncertainty of the economy and the retail market, the conference, which ended Thursday, attracted more than 5,000 attendees and 368 exhibitors. Attendance was down only slightly from the 5,200 total attendees at last year’s conference. Exhibiting companies were up 43 from the 325 that exhibited at IRCE 2008 in Chicago.

I was the second speaker, following Patrick Byrne, chairman and CEO of Overstock.com, who kicked off the main conference with a Keynote Address that emphasized the growing competitiveness of the e-retailing market and the need, in these challenging economic times, to stay one step ahead of the competition. Patrick also gave a disturbing review of the perils of being a public company when short sellers take aim at you.

In my talk, I focused on the trends in e-commerce spending as measured by comScore data. Shown below is what we’ve been seeing in 2009. Not a pretty picture. I had hoped that we had reached the bottom but I have to admit being disappointed by the decline in May. We’re hypothesizing that an increase in gas prices coupled with growing unemployment are the causes of the softness in the month.

Now, the question that everyone is asking is “When will we see growth resume?” To help get a fix on that, I examined consumer spending patterns by income and age and found some very interesting – but also disturbing – trends in the patterns of consumer behavior:

I believe that e-commerce spending is a good surrogate for consumers’ disposable income spending since it doesn’t include the necessities such as food and energy (which are not bought online). It’s clear from the comScore data that the older mid-to-upper income households (who have significant purchasing power) have significantly curtailed their online spending – if not reduced it. I have to believe that the destruction of wealth these households experienced in Q4 last year, coupled with their high debt levels and the fact that they have “few degrees of freedom” left, are the factors driving them to save and try to regain the wealth they need to pay for their kids’ college costs, retirement, etc.

Since overall consumer spending accounts for about 70% of the GDP, the lack of spending by this important consumer segment could possibly continue to be a drag on the GDP and the economy for some time going forward. We can but hope that this will not turn out to be the case.