Spanish Newspaper May Lose $1.4M In Ad Sales Due to Nielsen Oversight

A daily newspaper in Spain, El Pais, stands to lose $1.4 million in advertising revenue this year on its Web site, elpais.com, because of an oversight in the unique visitor ratings from the media rating company Nielsen, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court.

In March, Nielsen changed the way it measures unique Web site visits to include tracking Internet use at work, and companies in turn look to the data as "currency" for the value of its site to advertisers.

The lawsuit, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, charges Nielsen with trade libel and seeks unspecified monetary damages for publishing data that allegedly overestimated the number of unique visits to elpais.com that surfaced after the switch in data collection.

Under the earlier rating system, elpais.com had an estimated 2.37 million unique users in February. But, in September, news reports discovered that Nielsen had intended to reduce its estimate of elpais.com's audience by nearly 20% for August 2007 because of an over-inclusion of data, according to the complaint.

Nielsen published a revised report in November that found lower hits per month than had been previously reported.

Auditors first investigated the glitch when they noticed a high percentage of traffic on elpais.com's RSS page, which is a subscription-based site used to publish frequently updated content. Nielsen typically does not include these automated calls in its ratings, but had "improperly" done so in the month in question, according to the suit.

A spokeswoman for Nielsen, Karen Watson, cited company policy and said she could not comment on pending lawsuits.