What Do You Think About The ADM’s Standards For Downloadable Media?
Apr 18th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: Making Money with Podcasts 
The ADM, an industry group focusing on commercial downloadable media, is looking for feedback on its proposed Advertising Unit Standards (pdf) and Download Measurement Guidelines (pdf), which were released this week at ad:tech San Francisco.
The purpose of the Advertisement Unit Standards is to provide baseline recommendations for advertisement units in order to better facilitate advertising transactions relating to downloadable media.
The purpose of the Download Measurement Guidelines are to establish baseline recommendations for how individual publishers, companies and organizations can measure how downloads are delivered to consumer audiences.
What Do You Think?
You can provide feedback to the ADM three ways:
1. Enter your public statements in the comments section in the document comments pages:
2. Send your confidential statements to info@downloadablemedia.org
3. Send your confidential statements via mail to:
The Association for Downloadable Media
611 Pennsylvania Ave, SE #164
Washington, DC 20003-4303
I’d be interested in your thoughts on ADM’s proposals, too. Let me know what you think in the comments!
Maybe I’m daft, but what exactly are they saying that’s so groundbreaking? It’s an excuse for a press release, and industry coverage. It does not really say anything new. In fact, I would say it’s completely banal, except that given the emphasis on the “accuracy” they seem to place on “third party” stats gathering, it proves what I’ve been saying about the undue influence that podcasting networks (versus individuals) have had on the process. In other words, the thesis is wrong. The best stats will generally come from the point of origin; the place the file is served from; not from some third party network or application.
Eric
Part of the problem is some podcasters that are trying to analyze logs from the point of origin do not have tools to analyze the data properly.
I was talking with the guys at RawVoice and found out they spent nearly 6 months coding their measurement system, and they used origin data sets that numbered in the multi millions of downloads to refine their system.
By hosting me media on several sources, I can tell you the only numbers I truly trust today are from Rawvoice and Libsyn. Feedburner was way off and my raw log files analyzed locally with standard webstats tools was totally wrong.
The most important thing may be the process. They’ve thrown something out there to see if it will stick.
Their proposed standards are opt-in, so if they suck, are useless or are detrimental to podcasters, people won’t adopt them.
They are looking for feedback for 30 days, though. My guess is that a lot more people will gripe about the proposals than will comment on them. I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and comment using their suggested feedback options.
Jim,
Most third party download tracking is way off. So are web logs, no matter how you choose to measure them. Log files can be screwed up by the weirdest things. I don’t personally know about RawVoice, but from experience I would not trust Feedburner unless it were to chart trends, and I won’t trust Libsyn’s because of all the troubles they’ve had with even generating them. And let’s not forget a couple of years ago that they even had to block some aggregators because their servers weren’t configured to handle MS Bits and categorized Bits download attempts as DNS attacks.
And James,
I’m well aware of the ADM’s commentary period, and will be sure to voice my concerns there (the ones they don’t already know oabout), but I think it’s also a good idea to express my misgivings publicly, since I’m not sure how they’ll use the public feedback they get, or if will become part a publicly viewable record. Setting up a process is sometimes an admirable thing, but not always. Not when they are in the habit of excluding a large segment of the community from the planning process.
Eric