ePHOTOzine becomes ABCe accredited

Press Release:

ABCe, the independent audit watchdog for electronic media has told award-winning photo-website founder Peter Bargh that he had been misleading the imaging industry about his website visitor numbers.

And Bargh, founder of award-winning photographic website ePHOTOzine, is absolutely delighted with the news.

He explained: “We have always believed in being completely transparent about our statistics and until we applied for ABCe accreditation we had been working on the basis of an estimated 350,000 unique users to our website each month.

But ABCe auditors told us we were way out. The true number in a typical month was almost 412,000 - over sixty thousand more than we thought.”

Added Bargh: “We are just thrilled with this news. While it’s common for print magazines to declare ABC figures, we are the first photography website to have the confidence to audit our site. This underpins our mission to retain our pole position in this sector.”

ePHOTOzine, which caters for beginners, intermediate and advanced photographers, is the UK’s first online photography magazine to gain ABCe accreditation.

Bargh, a former EMAP journalist and editor launched the site six years ago from a back room in his house. Now ePHOTOzine comprises a 10-strong team and operates from an innovation centre in Shireoaks, Nottinghamshire.

He said: “When we first launched most advertisers didn’t have online budgets so we didn’t need ABCe accreditation – but that has changed dramatically over the past few years. Now all our advertisers can have complete confidence in our site visitor figures.”

Tracey Johnson, advertising director at ePHOTOzine.com added: “We always knew we were the market leader but we wanted ABCe accreditation to reinforce our position. Hopefully this move will pioneer a trend and all industry advertisers will demand ABCE accreditation before they commit their budgets. We see this as the way forward in our industry.”

Richard Foan, managing director at ABCe said: “ePHOTOzine is demonstrating a clear commitment to best practice by becoming the first ever photography site to achieve independent certification of its site traffic to industry agreed standards.

By committing to ABCe certification this enterprise is setting a positive example to other sites in the market that third party audited data is key in building a robust currency for the buying and selling of online media space. ePHOTOzine should be commended for developing this trust with its advertisers and stakeholders.”