Over the last few weeks there have been several postings on this forum about reporting, the performance of our systems and other technology related questions. I've responded to some of these, as well as having many direct conversations with publishers. There are a few general comments I'd like to make at this time.

Tracking
Some publishers have suggested that our tracking has been down or that their incomes are declining because of tracking problems. I have reviewed our system monitoring, tracking trends, publisher revenue per hour and other data and am satisfied there has been no downtime apart from the power failure on March 1st - the incident for which we are paying compensation as previously announced.

Reporting
On the general state and consistency of reporting, those of you who've been at our product workshops and other meetings will know that we're moving to a new way of reporting that is faster and more flexible. The first reports we delivered got a mixed reception, but have generally made a lot more information available, with far better response times than we previously offered. I understand this is not enough, and we are working on more, speaking direct to publishers and advertisers about what the priorities are. Those who've attended the workshops will know this is the case, and will have received written schedules for new releases, the next of which is due this week.

There have been a few short term problems with the status of our reporting as we've moved to our new architecture, and I can only apologise for these. Some of them were server-related issues, but most are to do with understanding of the content of reports. My team are working on clarifying what exactly each report contains, so that these misunderstandings are avoided: reports which are live will say so, others will say clearly "by validated date", "by sales date" and so on.

There have been a small number of genuine bugs in reporting during this transition: this is a normal part of software development, in my experience. My team has a good testing process, but no process is perfect. Where a real bug has been identified, we've deal with it quickly. I want to ensure this continues and is improved, and so my QA Team are briefing our Publisher Team to capture specific, detailed information whenever a bug is suspected. This will speed up our response when real problems are identified.

Spyware
We've always taken a strong position on spyware. As I explained in a posting last week, we do need some proof that people are using it. Some of the channels through which people take inventory on spyware networks are so well obscured publishers and advertisers are completely unaware of the true situation when we contact them, so we need to give people a chance to put things right before we suspend them. I would agree that delays have occurred, and I am working on how to identify and react to spyware more promptly. There is no ambiguity about our position, and if you have evidence of the use of spyware I'd ask you to pass it on.

Finally, I'd say that we are listening to your views, we are acting on them, and the management team at dgm take your needs very seriously. I look forward to speaking with many more of you over the coming months, so that we can continue to hear those views.