Key Points About Clickshare
CASIE and Audience Measurement

Clickshare establishes a relationship between World Web Web users and a most-trusted publisher, called the Clickshare Publishing Member. The user registers his name and credit information with this home-base publisher, and all access to Clickshare-enabled content throughout the Internet is then billed to the account the user maintains with his/her home-base publisher.

The home-base publisher, with the user's permission, may use tracking and billing records for demographic and marketing purposes. But under Clickshare, allowing simple, Web-wide access to information does not require a Web-wide names database.

"Within Clickshare, users are known to all publishers merely as a permanently assigned random number," says Bill Densmore, president of Newshare Corp., which developed the Clickshare system. "Only the user's home-base publisher the one place where the user must register is able to match that random number to a real name and real person."

Besides an assurance of privacy, Clickshare gives users simplified, one-password access to distributed information, both free and chargeable.

For content providers whether online services, traditional publishers or new-media enterprises the result is a universal user base and a system for selling small bits of information without shipping sensitive credit-card information across the Internet.

"Anyone who now uses the Internet regularly is familiar with the routine of trying to remember multiple IDs and passwords at differing sites," said Densmore. "Unless we develop an open standard, the situation will get worse as more publishers move to restrict information access to subscribers, members or one- time buyers. Clickshare's unified, free market can replace an increasingly impractical system of multiple passwords and credit relationships. It permits digital information to be independently owned but commonly obtained."

And for advertisers, the result is a system for collecting standardized usage and demographic data for aggregate analysis a way to obtain third-party validation of publisher's claims and make apples-to-apples comparisons of Web sites.

"Clickshare can aggregate user activity at multiple Web sites, giving advertiser's the specific-user information they critically need, yet do so without the threat of unauthorized release of a user's identity," says Densmore.

Densmore, Newshare's president, ticked off the following relevant points about the Clickshare Publishing System:

• No central names database. Clickshare publishers assign a number to each user. But the association of that number to a specific name is known only to the user's home (billing) publisher. There is no Clickshare-wide, central names database. Giving each user an anonymous ID which works across all Clickshare-affiliated sites satifies CASIE recommendations for user privacy with the ability to measure activity of identifiable, individual users over time.

• Demographic information voluntary and local. At registration, users may voluntarily submit demographic information about themselves. However, this information never travels beyond their local- or topic-specific home publisher without the user's permission.

• Key information for advertisers. Clickshare makes it possible for hundreds of publishers to collaborate in supplying aggregate, anonymous information about WWW usage at multiple locations. Advertisers can make apples-to-apples comparisons about market reach and effectiveness. This satisfies the CASIE guideline for "total medium measurement."

• Single ID convenient for users. By combining registration, tracking and transactions in a single, distributed approach, Clickshare enables users to buy information at many sites while having to log in only once per session, and maintain a registration at only one site." This satisfies the CASIE guideline for methods which "require the least effort" on the part of consumers.

DIRECT COMPARISONS TO CASIE GUIDELINES

Some other comparisons between the CASIE guidlines and Clickshare, according to Densmore, include:

• CASIE says some interactive advertisers "appear prepared to evaluate these media solely on the basis of leads and sales measures." Accordingly, a system such as Clickshare which combines both tracking and transaction settlement in one data set appears ideal.

• CASIE says "a consensus is emerging that the only way to recoup" investments in new media is "to combine consumer fees with advertiser expenditures." Clickshare leaves the relationship between subscription fees, advertising revenues and per-query charges completely in the hands of publishers.

• CASIE says that third-party measurement "should be taken by objective third-party research suppliers and not by the medium being measured." This suggests that obtaining and analyzing server logs from a publisher does not constitute third-party measurement. Clickshare acquires access records in real time for identified users and stores these records away from the publisher's site where tampering is unlikely.

• CASIE says the party responsible for audience measurement, in order to assure objectivity, should have "no vested interest in the outcome" of measurement data. Clickshare(sm) sells neither hardware nor software and has no vested interest in the success or failure of a particular Web publisher since it is paid based upon transactions, not advertising revenue.

The "CASIE Guiding Principles of Interactive Media Audience," are available at: