Providing accurate and meaningful numbers on the readership of a website is something management requires for internal reasons, but it`s also key to winning and retaining advertisers, and proving success (or failure) to investors.

Our dot com entrepreneur happens to know Dr Brain, and Dr Brain, amazingly, counts this among his numerous fields of expertise.

Consider three media supported by advertising: television, magazines and the web. All three need some kind of traffic or readership or viewer numbers. All three need those numbers to be independently verifiable by an external auditor. And all three have different problems in fulfilling this need.