The incremental informativeness of firm-disclosed web traffic metrics beyond third-party estimates
研究了互联网企业自愿披露网络流量指标（活跃用户和客户数）的信息含量，发现这些披露能预测未来销售增长、帮助分析师预测，并被投资者定价，且其信息增量超过第三方估计。
We examine the informativeness of voluntary disclosure of web traffic metrics (i.e., the active users and customers) by internet firms. We show that web traffic disclosures, adopted by approximately 30 percent of the firms in our sample, are relevant for predicting future sales growth, useful to analysts when making future sales forecasts, and priced by investors at earnings announcements. In particular, our findings are obtained after controlling for similar metrics provided by third-party vendors on a more frequent basis. This suggests that firms’ web traffic disclosures (which serve as a key non-financial performance indicator for internet firms) contain incremental information beyond third-party estimates. In additional analyses, we explore the characteristics of firms that voluntarily disclose web traffic metrics and examine whether they exhibit greater reporting opportunism than their non-disclosing counterparts.