New Study Challenges Online Buying Methods

With 75 percent of Americans online today, the Internet has come of age as a reach medium, and a new report suggests that advertisers need to understand how a Web site’s audience builds over time and adjust their buys accordingly.

“Agencies should be cognizant of how their impressions are distributed over a given month and push the sites to more efficiently distribute them,” said Kathryn Koegel, director of research and industry development at DoubleClick, the New York-based online ad technology company that issued the joint study today with comScore Media Metrix of Reston, Va.

The research concluded that audience cume—always a factor in assessing reach in TV and print advertising—should be applied to the Web to balance ad delivery among heavy and light users.