TV1: Afera with internet portal visitor measurements looming in BiH

Measuring the reach of Bosnian internet sites is becoming increasingly questionable. Outdated technology, marketing agency malversations, and low-quality content are increasingly destroying visitor data, and thus the entire internet market. The only company measuring internet site reach in BiH is Poland's Gemius, as a project of the company Valicon. They do not have an office in our country, but operate from Croatia through the company Gemius d.o.o. Zagreb. 

TV1 reported back in 2011 on possible irregularities in Gemius's operations in BiH, which pays no taxes in BiH nor has it reported or harmonized its measurements with the competent authorities in our country. Gemius Audience has never received a national license from the media industry to do this job in BiH, and it is a private market research agency that conducts these studies for its own interest.

However, in the absence of other measurement agencies, Gemius, despite all its shortcomings, has imposed its research as the only official one in BiH. Today, almost all BiH publishers use it. The measurement methodology used by Gemius in BiH, unlike in Croatia, Serbia, and the rest of Europe, is based on cookie technology and an algorithm created more than 10 years ago, when smartphones and many social networks did not even exist. 

Therefore, many domestic internet sites are damaged, and the Gemius methodology used is highly susceptible to manipulation, which is most exploited by hybrid portals. Gemius in BiH highlights the estimated data on alleged real users, according to which media planning and ad purchases on internet portals are most often made. This data includes the total number of visitors who visited any page of a specific portal at least once during the month, even for a second. As many as ten internet portals from BiH use this to, so to speak, cheat Gemius's data on alleged real users and attract advertisers.

With cheap tricks, via Facebook, they bring visitors once a month for one second, and sell them to advertisers as real audiences.

These portals, which lack a real audience and cheat Gemius, are easy to recognize. If other Gemius parameters important for recognizing the quality of a web portal are compared, such as time spent on the page, number of pages read, or number of visits to the media's homepage, the difference between serious media and these so-called hybrid portals is easily noticeable.

Through Facebook, they bombard the audience with headlines like "Look at this," "You won't believe what happened," "What happened next..." This is called clickbait headlines in internet jargon, or in translation, a lure for clicks, and thus for new alleged real users on Gemius.

Gemius has a remedy for such fraud, which is separate counting of visits to specific segments of the portal. However, segmentation is not mandatory, and only a few media outlets in BiH have done it. On hybrid portals, the news ceases to be news and becomes a lure for clicks and alleged real visitors who become victims of their own emotions.

The deceived party is the advertiser, who pays for a second of Facebook audience time at premium ad prices. And so, without the need for quality journalism, hybrid portals turn to stealing news, satirical or fake articles, and for these copy-paste actions, they most often engage minors from underdeveloped areas of BiH whom they do not even have to pay for this job. TV1 will continue to report on this topic in the coming days.