Wrestling with measurement

Cross-media measurement tools seem to be all the rage at present. Advertisers want to equate their media spend and analyse the impact of their budget across the different media...ie press, broadcast and new media. Advertising measurement specialists are trying their best to assist with a host of systems and packages. Erik Sass has an interesting discussion on some of those currently available.

With traditional media (press and broadcast) the audience was quantifiable but with new media there are so many more uncertainties. My understanding is that one proposal is to measure the time spent with a page 'open'. I quite often leave a page I am interested in open all day, just refreshing it occasionally. My time actually spent reading the page probably only numbers minutes.

No, there has to be another way for new media. My suggestion would be a sample of viewers analysed via a users pointing camera to look at when the screen is being looked at in conjunction with a log of the pages fully open. This measure of 'actively viewed' pages as I see it would have to be the most accurate form of measurement for new media.