How Will Nielsen Fare in a Quintopoly?

In TV land Nielsen has long been a monopoly. Handwritten diaries and small sample sizes have driven $65B in annual spending for years but that is not how it's going to play out online.

What's amazing is that it won't even be a lowly duopoly between Nielsen and comScore. These two appear to be content fighting it out with each other when the reality is that newcomers Hitwise, Compete, and Quantcast are developing some incredibly robust and impressive intelligence to provide advertisers with larger samples and click stream-driven intelligence. While the original players certainly will have their spin on why these new companies' data isn't up to par one thing is certain: click stream data beats panel data hands down all day long.

The ability to view upstream and downstream "other sites visited" is good, but I'm guessing that these companies will provide site by site data that measures the audience visitation disparity between an advertiser's products and its competitors. A web site scores high for your competitor's customers but not yours? Fertile ground and well worth the premium CPM.

Calling this a quintopoly might not even be fair. Industry-specific data providers like JD Power and primary research firms like Gartner are also creating data models which will be valuable to advertisers. The fact is, competition breeds innovation and excellence and getting great consumer data is one area that online has an insurmountable lead over its offline counterparts.