Balanced_View

Yahoo! Slams comScore

Full disclosure: I worked for comScore years ago, and as a result I do own some of the stock. But I have not been a comScore employee for years, nor does my livelihood by any means depend on the performance of the company.

Seriously, do Decker's comments "slam" comScore as your headline suggests? Dictionary.com defines "slam" in this context as "to criticize harshly; attack verbally." I don't see that here, I see a contrasting view of what different numbers say, and a disagreement over which to use for different applications. (By the way, no question the ZDnet blog post is a slam.)

But the public audience metrics cited publicly, and which sometimes draw disagreement, are only the tip of the iceberg of the information companies like Yahoo! and 1,000+ others receive from comScore and Nielsen about consumer behavior, intentions etc. The vast majority of the information these companies pay for is never published and/or doesn’t attract these debates.

Why have so many companies continued to buy this stuff for almost a decade? Why did so many buy it well before it was so widely published? Because for the vast majority of businesses, it works. The extent to which it is valuable far outweighs the number of situations in which it is not.

Could it be because there is no other game in town? That can't be, because there are plenty of alternatives, and history documents that many more companies gave this business a shot but failed to deliver enough value, accuracy or whatever to sustain themselves.

My experience tells me that those who go to critical extremes on this issue are a vocal minority with any number of motivations. Of course the numbers are not all perfect, show me something that is. A balanced view of this situation is appropriate. But then, dramatic words in bold print are usually flashier than balance.