In a lengthy statement, Zoopla communications head Lawrence Hall says OTM may well have recorded its ‘one millionth visit’ but that is wildly different to its claim of ‘one million unique visitors’ – something which is “either misunderstood [by OTM] or deliberately intended to mislead” says Hall.

OTM’s statement earlier this week did not source the figure, whereas Zoopla’s claims about OTM visits made a week ago have sourced Hitwise, which Hall describes as “the most widely recognised and used metric for internet businesses.”

He claims that OTM’s ‘unique’ visitors are more likely to be around 20 per cent of its one million claim. “The Hitwise data would suggest that they meant visits and not unique visitors and on this basis, OTM has achieved the same audience in the last 3 weeks that ZPG gets in less than a day” he says.

He also says OTM would need to grow to around 50 times its current audience size to deliver the same value to agents as listing on ZPG. “You can’t really have it both ways – if we are expensive, then OTM must be exorbitant since it charges similar fees but delivers a fraction of the value” Hall insists.

He also says that far from catching Zoopla and Rightmove, OTM “has not yet managed on any day since its launch to reach even a fraction of the traffic of PrimeLocation.”

OnTheMarket’s claim that the new portal’s TV ad will air over 3,000 times in February alone “must be very disappointing given the large TV and print marketing spend” says Hall.

Although Ian Springett, chief executive of OnTheMarket, has not revealed the methodology for assessing visitors to the new portal, he has replied to Zoopla by saying: “We stand by every figure we have previously stated and there is no question that on Saturday we welcomed our one millionth unique user to OnTheMarket.”

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