According to Marc Phillips, Director of APT Strategies "this is a classic piece of media research allowing comparison of duplicated readership of over 50 Australian major websites including:

All Fairfax online properties (such as the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review, The Trading Room, BRW, Citysearch and The Age (Melbourne), News.com.au, Yellow Pages, AltaVista, BigPond, Australian Stock Exchange, Seek Communications, JobNet, Commercial Dynamics, publishers of The Trading Post, ZDNet, Travel.com.au, Telstra White Pages. LookSmart, and OzEmail websites."

Australia’s major media buyers and planners have endorsed the methodology, underpinned by an industry agreed weighting procedure. Combined with APT Strategies online media planning software, it allows media planners to determine reach across a broad range of Australian websites in the same way that traditional newspapers and magazines.

This information will make media scheduling on the Internet more targeted and allows buyers to purchase advertising efficiently across multiple websites.

"A major roadblock for media buyers to justify larger online advertising budgets has been the lack of accountable statistics that are statistically sound, easily generated and comparable to other offline media schedules" says an APT Strategies spokesman.

For example, a media buyer can place advertising on those sites with a similar demographic profile, grouped by income, education or other media variables. Demographic and psychographic profiles by website are crucial for both effective targeting and fully integrated media planning with 'offline' media Another dimension to the survey is readers’ frequency of site visits.

According to Dale McCarthy, National Marketing Manager of Fairfax Online, "with the profiles from the readership survey, we can finally target beyond webographics (user's browser, platform, domain) and site content with a range of buyergraphic and pyschographic variables."

Andrea Koch, Marketing Director of News Interactive added that "in order to grow the online advertising industry, we need research tools that the media buyers understand and is comparable to traditional media research. Readership is a currency that all media buyers and planners understand."

With online advertising now booming, The Australian Online Readership Survey will instill confidence into the media departments. "It is great to see a tool that media planners and buyers can use that is in a format that they understand and is comparable across other media. The ability to analyse over 50 of the top Australian websites is what the industry is looking for", said Monique Harris, National Advertising Sales Manager of Ozemail.

13,114 respondents completed the Online Readership Survey. The results were weighted to the 121 million marketable impressions that were generated by the websites each month. This methodology simulates press and magazine advertising inventory and is a better measure of website readership than visits. This data produces duplicated and unduplicated reach across the sites. See page 3 next.

The methodology is further enhanced by not allowing sponsored questions to be put on the survey which leads to longer response times and corresponding fall out responses rates.

APT Strategies is one of Australia's leading online research companies having conducted over 100 qualitative and quantitative research projects and over 150 Internet research and electronic commerce studies for leading Australian and international companies. In 1998/99, APT Strategies completed over 45,000 online interviews with Australian Internet users. The Australian Online Readership Survey has been endorsed by Australia’s leading websites and is conducted half yearly.

The chart shows duplicated readership for the sample in the survey. Figures over 50% represent a high degree of duplicated readership between the sites. Where the figure is below 50% or under 30% indicates low duplication or even strong unique readership