Allison Laikin write < I am preparing a final budget for an event that
received extensive free coverage on the internet...calendar listings,
Governor's site, web articles,
> etc...  Has anyone calculated an in-kind value for that type of
advertising?>
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Allison,

The answer lies in translating the media measurement E.A.V.  ( Estimated
Advertising Value )  into the newer medium of the web.  I have developed a
new measure called E.V.E. ( Estimated Virtual Exposure ) to meet this
performance requirement.  In essence, it is the total amount of 'virtual
time' that you engage your site visitors.

Traditional E.A.V. is the amount of free PUBLICITY (as opposed to paid
PROMOTION) that you generate in a given time period - usually an annual
reconciliation.  For example, you might take a ruler and ltierally measure
the amount of free column centimeters you have achieved in the print media
in a given year.  This has a dollar value which you can calculate by looking
at what it would have cost you if you had to pay your newpaper / magazine
for the same amount of paid advertising.  You can use the same approach with
TV (how many seconds achived etc.)

E.V.E. is calculated slightly differently.

Web 'hits' are not an accurate measurement of virtual exposure as they are
dependant on page construction as well as patronage.  Hits are good for
mapping general trends in site usage.

Your ISP or your own servers should be able to tell you  the total number of
site PAGES being read each day / month/ an on average.  Software and third
party web survey companies can provide you will daily/monthly/average for
the LENGTH OF TIME in minutes that each visitor spends on your site.

Armed with these two statistics you can calculate E.V.E.

Here is an example:

Your website records monthly total of 10,000 pages.  Your average time for
the same month  is 5.24 minutes.  Therefore your E.V.E. for the month is
873.33 hours (52,400 minutes).  If you record this each month you can end up
with an annual statistic that can be employed to demonstrate to Boards,
funders and sponsors the exposure they will get by being on your site

A large web site I professionally manage has, for the year to date, recorded
7,105,451 pages viewed and each has an average of 6.2 minutes.  The E.V.E.
value of our site is 734,423 hours  which goes a long way to explaining why
it is ranked in the top 5 in the education category nationally.   What would
the cost be to engage your target audience for this length of time if you
had to pay for it using tradional media?

This is but one of the measurements that can be employed.  Others include
such things as  the number of consummations from web generated forms (and
there are several more).

I hope the above is of use to you and I would be happy for you to share it.

with best wishes
Roger
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