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To: Eric Wells who wrote (74998)	8/21/1999 1:26:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 164684

Yes that is how they do it, with IP addresses, so there is a lot wrong with MM... two huge issues are they don't track international hits unless they come in to the mother site, so japan.yahoo.com is not counted at all, and also intranet hits aren't counted (I think due to this IP address issue). Since intl and business users are the fastest growing segments, and especially since yahoo is expanding into the intranet space, it makes mm pretty useless. The ones they publish are "unique users per month" but subscribers can get all kinds of data, unique pages visited per users, etc.

To: Eric Wells who wrote (74998)	8/21/1999 3:11:00 PM
From: Martin Muldoon	Respond to of 164684

Eric, I just looked on the Media Metrix site for how they measure unique users. They don't explain how they do it. I doubt it's by counting the number of unique ip addresses though. I know that many ISP's use different types of technology to conserve ip addresses because there is a limit to the number you will be granted. At the company that I work for we use a feature of NT server called DHCP. You are assigned an address when you log on the network but it becomes available again the moment that you log off. I don't know what AOL does but I know MSN uses this. This being the case, the only way that I know of other than a person logging on is through the uses of Cookies which is what they do here on SI if you check the Keep me logged in? box on the log on page. Hope this helps. Martin

To: Eric Wells who wrote (74998)	8/21/1999 5:04:00 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 164684

Hi Eric Wells; Regarding how Media Metrix identifies "unique users." While it is true that they use automatic counters to measure hits on sites &c., I believe they get their statistics for the total number of people connected to the net by calling up a large number of randomly sampled people on the telephone. I get this impression from reading a whole bunch of their press releases. I was trying to get data on the internet's growth rate, but couldn't find enough free data to do it well. -- Carl