Industry treats transparency with a yawn

A couple of years ago (October 2005) we posted an item about well-known market consultant and researcher Rebecca McPheters of McPheters and Co. and her plans to launch readership.com. It was to be a more transparent and complex means of measuring the readership of publications. At the time,our comment was that it would be interesting to see whether publishers and media buying agencies would embrace such a system and whether it would slop over the 49th parallel. Well, they didn't and it won't. McPheters has just announced that, after two launch delays, she is abandoning the idea. Apparently she was unable to raise more than half the necessary US$5 million to launch it.