Last up in my crowdsourcing of CM Summit conversations is Gian Fulgoni, Founder and Chair of Comscore, the controversial and defacto measurement service for the Internet.
Gian is no stranger to these pages, I’ve interviewed him recently here; posted about his company here, and here. Comscore is the company “everyone loves to hate,” according to a recent Fortune piece.
My own view of the company has become more nuanced in the past year or so. I am on the board of the IAB, and Comscore, along with rival Neilsen, have agreed to undergo an MRC audit to address, once and for all (we hope), the discrepancies between their panel based measurement systems and what publishers see in their own logs. Fulgoni has been vocal in his defense of Comscore’s weighted approach, which he says takes into consideration factors that internal logs don’t – in particular multiple IP addresses and cookie deletion. Sound boring? It’s not, if you care about the future of the entire marketing ecosystem.
My questions for Gian include:
– Explain cookie deletion and multiple IPs – why are your estimates of web traffic so much lower than ours?
– What do you make of the upstarts looking to overtake your business – Quantcast and Compete?
– Google AdPlanner?
– How does one measure rich and streaming media?
– What about more complicated stuff like CM?
So what do you want to ask Fulgoni?
Other CM conversants, still eager to hear your questions (the conference starts Weds. morning):
David Rosenblatt (CEO DoubleClick, now at Google)
Laura Desmond (CEO Starcom)
Joel Hyatt (CEO Current)
Evan Williams (co-founder Twitter)
Please ask him when they’re going to abandon that awful metric for search market share — number of queries performed.
Please ask him when they’re going to focus on actual search destinations in their search market share (Yahoo! and MSN have huge non-search audiences).
Please ask him if they can actually clock the referrals that search engines send to other sites.
Gian, you’ve taken some heat in the trades about the accuracy of your video view counts. Can you please comment on this? Many say that comScore is grossly underreporting the video view counts. Also, how do compare with Visible Measures and the data that they’re providing for their clients?
Why does Comscore rely on panel data when direct measurement seems to be more accurate?
As the media universe continues to fracture, what if anything is your strategy to more accurately reflect the traffic of smaller social sites?
Please ask him to define what a “search engine” is.
;D nmw
The Internet seems to be moving towards direct measurement rather than panel based, as a non-technical person, I would like to better understand what the weaknesses of direct measurement are? It seems like they are closer to perfect than panel-based. Is this not true and why?
Transparency. These days, a publisher can got to Quantcast and become “Quantified” which, in turn, and marketer can see – in real-time, every day.
How does ComScore plan to become more transparent in their measurement techniques and reporting?
I quit working at a company called Jupiter Media Metrix in August of 2001. I had worked with Relevant Knowledge since the beginning of 1998 before it was acquired by Media Metrix. This is all so many years ago. I’ve since been painting and selling my artwork.
Why do I even care about this? I don’t know, I should probably go to my studio and paint, but I still read your blog. What is funny, and clearly interesting, to me is to see that the questions being asked of the audience measurement companies are the exact same questions that were being asked ten years ago. (sure the video question is different, but the general substance of the questions are the exact same.)
The uproar from websites was constant and we spent many many meetings internally and externally diligently and sincerely trying to best understand why the numbers were so different. My point is that these questions have been beaten and beaten down again. Someday perhaps “The Audit” will finally happen– my guess is that it will reveal more about the clamor and distraction from the websites than it does any revelation about something being wrong with the data.
If I were you, I would ask Gian, what are the questions the sites you measure should be asking you? How should they best use use your data in conjunction with their own internal measurement tools? What can the industry as a whole do help the measurement companies (define classifications of sites– as per the question above, is it really the measurement companies job to define SEARCH as a category? this should come from people like you, not the measurement company).
In short, who does it serve to keep trying to torch the measurement companies. Work with what you got, it’s pretty useful data. The numbers are never as big as you want, they never will be.
Please ask him to define what a “search engine” is.
A Web search engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web…lolo