(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High-Tech News Site in Japanese)
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| Nippon Research Surveys Audience Rates for Home Pages
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August 28, 1998 (TOKYO) - Nippon Research Center Inc. in July conducted
Japan's first survey on audience rates for Internet home pages.
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It will disclose the survey results in mid-September, company officials
announced.
The survey was conducted in four weeks in July on 550 Internet users.
The marketing survey company had the Internet users monitor corporate
home pages.
The survey is the first of this scale conducted by a neutral, third-party
organization. Industry observers hope the survey will be an indicator
with which they can make objective comparisons of the value of each
home page as a medium.
Masafumi Tominaga, president of the research center, said his company
will establish its own survey method based on the survey, and it aims
to be the only survey company that is a third-party organization for
audience rates for the Internet in Japan.
The firm was set up in 1960 with an aim of conducting surveys on the
effect of advertisements in newspapers and other media. Currently, Ajinomoto
Co., Inc., Toyota Motor Corp., Nomura Securities Co., Ltd. and 17 other
companies invested in the firm.
The company will announce in its report a ranking of the top 100 most-accessed
sites, the total number of users who accessed each site, accesses by
the hour and users' attributes.
The survey results will be disclosed for free. The company plans to charge
for future survey results.
It expects search engine firms, network providers that operate a virtual
shopping mall, companies and advertising agencies planning to place
banner ads on such home pages to be its customer.
In the future, the company will analyze trends and create reports for
individual customers, the officials said.
The survey firm collected and analyzed data using a system jointly developed
with HyperTak Inc. of the United States. Data were collected with "Net
Rover" software installed on monitors' PCs and "Net Surveyer" running
on the firm's server.
Net Rover constantly confirms operations of a Web browser, and transfers
both a URL of a home page displayed on the browser and the access time
as one record to Net Surveyer at any time. Using this method, the company
collected a total of 1.09 million records in four weeks.
The company randomly selected the monitors, who accessed the Internet
for more than three hours per week, from about 6,700 users invited publicly
for its various Internet-based questionnaire surveys. They used Windows
95-based PCs.
Users registered with the company attributes such as their age, sex and
access point beforehand. The survey company added up the data by matching
access data and attributes. It uses data only as statistical figures
to protect users' privacy.
(Nikkei Multimedia)
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