Nielsen and comScore: who me?
Nielsen NetRatings and comScore have both responded to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s “request” for an open audit of their methodologies and to acquire accreditation by the Media Ratings Council. Here’s the comScore press release, and here’s Nielsen NetRatings response.
Let me save you the trouble and paraphrase: comScore, “We’re already being reviewed by another group and will release our findings shortly.” NetRatings, “We’re already going above and beyond what you’re asking.”
I was pretty encouraged by all this, because I support what the IAB is trying to accomplish. But while the two companies may have expressed an interest in dialog with the IAB, I wouldn’t bet the ranch on anything cooperative soon.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 9:45 am and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:04 am
It’s truly unfortunate that Nielsen, in particular, used their position as the standard for audience measurement in radio and television to dupe people into believing that they had a worthwhile and accurate tool for internet audience measurement. Using a panel approach to measure anything has immediate and obvious flaws. Assuming that this method works for the internet is ridiculous. The internet’s diversity and ability to cater to niche topics and audiences is truly the one thing that makes it superior to any other form of media or content delivery. I imagine if cable or satellite were to provide the same level of diversity they would need 100,000 channels or more. Measurement of the general populations usage of a big name site like Google could be achieved, but even so, still in the most general sense. A report with text something like “more people appear to use Google than any other search engine”, could be widely accepted. That is the type of generalized information their interpolation could be used for.
In the case of Nielsen-Netratings or Comscore feeding numbers of unique users to people, for sites which they have no direct tracking module installed is nothing short of fraudulent activity. Most certainly some of their products are designed to track page views and visitors, but, those are products for which you have to sign up and have an image or script installed on your pages.
My hope is that through third party investigation and auditing, the panel type results are removed from an already cloudy picture.