Jeff Jarvis on ABC trying to measure Web audience:

As it turned out, advertisers didn’t really care about auditing the audience of online sites — and thus publishers didn’t want to pay for the service. Advertisers care only about auditing their own flights of ads; the wanted to verify that they got what they paid for. And that makes sense. For in an online site, you don’t really care how big the whole site is; you care about how many people your ads reach how many times.

That’s about the size of it.

In all the sites I’ve been involved with, I’ve never once been asked or heard of an advertiser asking for ABC audit information. Advertisers either want to know how impressions and click-throughs are measured, or want to use their own tracking code.

News sites need to pay close attention to a wide array of Web metrics, and pick some key performance indicators to target for growth, but audits are pretty unnecessary.