Telegraph escapes ad ban after ASA investigation of web claim

by Jacquie Bowser Brand Republic 25-Apr-07, 09:10

LONDON - Ads for the Telegraph's online edition have escaped a ban after being investigated by the ASA, following a claim that it wrongly publicised itself as the UK's most visited quality newspaper website.

A poster for telegraph.co.uk was headlined, "Britain's No.1 quality newspaper website". Text underneath stated the site was visited more times than any other newspaper website between July to September 2006, quoting the source as hitwise.co.uk, based on UK visits only.

A single complaint was lodged with the advertising watchdog, challenging whether two months of data from Hitwise was sufficient to substantiate the claim "No.1".

The Telegraph argued that it had based the claim on data compiled over a three-month period by Hitwise, and this indicated that the site consistently received the highest number of visits. According to the figures, Telegraph Online had a 4.99% market share of website visitors in the UK, followed by The Times Online with 4.45% and The Guardian Unlimited on 4.35%.

The Guardian's website is widely believed to be the UK's most popular quality newspaper site. According to ComScore figures for September, the Guardian's website had 2.93m unique users compared with 1.22m for the Telegraph Online.

The difference in figures stems from the method used to collect the data.

Hitwise uses the visit metric method, which counts the number of times a particular website was visited in a given period; the same person could visit that website multiple times and be counted as a visit each time. Whereas, ComScore, favoured by the Guardian, uses the unique user metric method, which counts the number of unique individuals who visit a particular website in a given period.

As yet, there are no audited user figures for the UK, therefore individual titles can quote different sources when referring to online statistics.

The Telegraph argued that in the absence of any audited figures, it had believed Hitwise was a valid source for website usage.

The Advertising Standards Authority agreed with the Telegraph and did not uphold the complaint.

The watchdog said that because the ad made clear that the "No.1" claim was based on the number of visits to the site and also made clear the source of the data and the period from which it was taken, the claim was unlikely to mislead.

Guardian Unlimited was contacted, but declined to comment. However, earlier this year Simon Waldman, the Guardian's digital media chief, hit back at the Telegraph's number one website claim.