The Audit Bureaux of Australia (ABA) has increased its safe list of audited websites to over 200 with the addition of all of First Digital Media’s sites. First Digital Media has received the ABA green tick this month for Business Spectator, Crikey, SmartCompany, Eureka Report, Climate Spectator and Startup Smart. This marks another milestone in terms of numbers of websites passing the audit and yet another publisher taking a stand against auto-refresh.

First Digital Media has become the latest publisher to remove auto-refresh. They join publishers including Realestate.com.au, SBS, Allure Media and Austereo in responding to the Media Federation of Australia’s call for industry reform of this practice.

Auto-refreshing of pages is a major concern for media buyers because it can cause dollars to be wasted on ads that automatically refresh without being viewed. Use of auto-refresh can also severely inflate the metrics used by media buyers to evaluate website and campaign performance.

“We are delighted that First Digital Media, along with all our websites, has been accredited through the ABA’s audit process,” says Oliver Hinton, chief executive of First Digital Media. “We certainly look forward to continuing to work with advertisers who expect their media partners to deliver advertising and reporting to industry best practice.” 

ABA chief executive Paul Dovas welcomed First Digital Media to the ABA and said: “First Digital Media joins a growing list of publishers that have stepped up to their responsibility and committed to ending auto-refresh.

“We are also encouraged to see increasing numbers of audited publishers embracing the ABA green tick as a meaningful symbol and using it on their websites, media kits and email signatures to show advertisers they are meeting the highest standard for their audience data and for their measurement practices.”
 
Dovas added: “Since the introduction of the web audit service 18 months ago we have made significant progress addressing issues such as auto-refresh and are currently working with some of the larger publishers as they make the technical changes required for them to become compliant.”
 
The ABA web audit verifies audience metrics for measurement rules compliance for digital properties and reports these audit results in both the ABA and Nielsen media-planning directories. More than 210 websites are now ABA audited with the Business and IT categories reporting the most audited sites. See the complete member list of safe websites at: http://www.auditbureau.org.au/webauditmembers.php

Advertisers can also access all ABA print and web data by registering for online access at www.auditbureau.org.au.

For media enquiries/interviews please contact:
Heather Craven, ABA Marketing Director on +61 2 8912 6001
Alexx Cass, ABA Digital Services Manager on +61 2 8912 6009
Email: marketing@auditbureau.org.au