Prisa sues Nielsen Online over visitor number dispute

Media giant Prisa, which owns Spanish paper El Pais, is suing research firm, Nielsen Online, over a dispute about the number of visitors to El Pais' website. Prisa accuses Nielsen of causing damage to the reputation of its flagship paper by publishing inaccurate visitor numbers for ElPais.com in 2007. In Aug, the research firm revised down visitor numbers to El Pais, which the Spanish media giant says was unjust. In the complaint, it says: "Serious negligence on the part of Nielsen in its measurement of audience figures for El Pais.com caused El Pais and Prisa to suffer serious damages due to lost advertisement this year." The media group claims it will lose USD1.4m in ad revenue as a result of the alleged mistake. Nielsen reportedly over-estimated El Pais.com's visitor numbers in Feb, because it had mistakenly included traffic on the site's RSS page, which is not supposed to be included in the overall traffic figure. As a result of the revision, in Aug, it appeared as though the number of visitors to the newspaper's site had declined nearly 20% since Feb.