The news release that Comscore now includes mobile measurement is plain and simply embarrassing.
- Mobile usage has been around since 2008 and growing exponentially since then. Mobile measurement has been in Google Analytics since Oct 2009.. Many of the sites at Alloy have been witnessing 30% mobile penetration since early last year. How was Comscore allowed to take so long to get incorporate this audience?
- Standards are supposed to be accurate. For those that would argue that #1 really didn’t matter because we were all under-reported, tell that to Pandora, whose rank jumped dramatically. How do they recoup nearly two years of under-reporting to their advertising rates? Sue Comscore? In other words, everyone doing the wrong thing is still wrong.
- The web is supposed to create transparency and be far more accurate in terms of audience engagement than traditional media. Well clearly that has not been the case for the last 2-3 years. Way too many $ at stake for this kind of under-reporting to be taking place. If Pandora was doing about $100 million driven by ad impressions on an audience of 22 million (desktop) as opposed to a multi-media audience of 48 million, how much more revenue would they have generated with 26 million more visitors on a monthly basis for say 1 year? LOTS.
- What kind of other reporting standard has baked their numbers that badly? Wait, oh right, the financial industry with Moody’s and S&P absolutely cooking the mortgage industry financial markets by ignoring key data and pricing the derivative properties artificially, all in the name of standards. And while the outcome of under reporting is not as severe as over reporting in the case of the mortgage backed securities markets, the lack of accuracy is troubling.
There needs to be a better more accurate way to measure audience. Please. Someone solve this problem. It will have enormous positive consequences in the industry leveling the playing field and putting trust back into a very broken industry.