The Web 2.0 does not change the definition of what a unique visitor should be. It just bring new possibilities to get closer to this definition.

The holy grail of unique visitors is the possibility of recognizing the same individual. There are two notions in the concept of unique visitor:

• It is a human being (as opposed to a computer program)
• In spite of various aspects, it remains unique.

One of my favorite philosophers, Clement Rosset, wrote in "Le Réel, traité de l’idiotie” (“The Real, treaty of idiocy”): “idiotès, stupid, means simple, unique." According to him, everything that is real is by definition single, idiot. Let's therefore call the unreachable ontologically unique visitor, an "idiot visitor". :-)
End of the philosophical parenthesis ...

If the “idiot visitor” is beyond the reach of technology, we can satisfy ourselves with the unique visitor. And one definition, using the two above points, could be:

• Detect that the content is viewed by a human being
• And recognize the same person from one content to another.

None of this has changed with the arrival of Web 2.0. But what has changed is the technical capacity that is offered to improve the implementation of this definitions.

The robots who aspire pages attempt to act as humans. The audience measurement systems must therefore do their utmost to automatically remove the pages served to robots.
The use of advanced scripts, such as those that we have developed, can surely detect the presence of a human being behind the screen.

Of course, the robots will try to improve, and one day they may circumvent the system as it is deployed today. But it will take them an increasingly important amount of resources, and we can easily set the bar a little higher.
In this race to technology, the goal is not to find an unlikely unbreakable method, but to make piracy more expensive than the benefit.

That’s how to get rid of most non-human visitors.

For the other dimension, that of "recognize" a visitor, analytic tools usually put cookies (a small file stored on your hard-drive by your browser). Again, there is a danger of counting too many visitors, by counting several times the same visitor if his cookie cannot be retrieved. That happens:

• If he uses multiple computers
• If he uses multiple browsers
• If he delete its cookies
• If a software deletes them for him.

In each of these cases, the effect is the same: the number of unique visitors is overestimated.

Conversely, if several people share the same computer, there may be one cookie for several idiots, sorry, unique individuals.

We are not going to tell you that our technology makes it possible to detect the idiot visitor. But we have the ability to dramatically improve the problem of cookies.

All visitors to the sites that use our system can create an Alenty account. This account is used as a reference for us to count them as a unique visitor. Thus, on a single computer, two users identified with their Alenty account are counted as two different visitors!
On the other hand, a user who is identified on a computer s ithat different from the one he used earlier is counted only once!

The standard audience measurement tools do not have this capability. Why?
Because the user has no interest to identify himself. But if he has something to gain, he may do it.

Everyone will not create an Alenty account. But all those who do will contribute to improve the accuracy of our measure.

And a part of our job is to find the right ways to motivate people to identify themselves.

It will even be more accurate when we gather the identification from the website itself...

To be continued…