Media Buyers, the Pageview and Video Scheming.

A few weeks ago, I noted for Jack Myers Media Business Report that Nielsen was doing away with the pageview as a leading metric but replacing it with another imperfect scheme. On PaidContent (which I'll be helping on an event in October and have contributed to in the past), executive editor Staci Kramer asks an excellent question: How are Nielsen, comScore and IAB going to solve the autoplay issue, "where sites jack up streaming numbers by delivering video whether or not a user wants it?"

Ultimately, media buyers are going to have to do something they may not be comfortable with: Using their intelligence, instead of straight metrics. For example, 20 minutes per page may make little sense for a video site, when users tend to like videos of less than 3-4 minutes, but may make big sense for a gaming site, and the people there are very engaged. Then, again, do those gamers want to interrupt their engagement to view or absorb an ad? Or a video site may make sense for a video site if it's showing feature films.

Like I said, media buyers need to have thinking caps on. Maybe this can't be relegated to the most junior person, anymore.