14 DAY TRIAL // comScore, one of the biggest analysis firms in the field, is a very important tool in the web business, giving information and trends about web site traffic. Its methods, however, have been disputed at times as sites claimed their internal measurements were very different from comScore's. The analysis firm hopes to put an end to those critics by adding a new service it calls Media Metrix 360.
comScore's current method of calculating web traffic involves a panel of 2 million Internet users around the world, which it monitors, keeping track of what sites they are browsing and making statistics. The new method will combine the data from this panel with the web sites’ own server statistics data to get an answer. This can't work for all sites of course but it is aimed at the larger ones with big traffic numbers.
“comScore Media Metrix 360 represents an innovative and elegant measurement solution to the increasingly complex digital media landscape,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore president and CEO. “Through comScore’s ‘panel-centric hybrid’ approach to audience measurement, we are able to combine the best of both worlds of panel and server-side measurement to bring the industry a comprehensive accounting of the complete digital media universe. Furthermore, this new approach will effectively reconcile panel and server-based measurement and provide unified numbers that are fully consistent with the ad server counts used for advertising payments.”
Some large site operators complained that their own data didn't coincide with the data from comScore and in some cases the discrepancies were big. Some of the complaints were about the fact that the comScore current system didn't account for the sites panel members visited at work. Bob Bowman, MLB.com CEO, is optimistic about the new technology. “For our site, 70 percent of day traffic comes during working hours. Missing that is comparable to saying we built a beautiful boat – it just doesn't have a bottom yet... I reject completely that panels can ever work when it comes to what people do at work,” Bowman said. “I don't know why for top-250 sites, such as MLB.com, our files just can't be audited, and (the auditors) say yup, here's the traffic.”