"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
With a sense of timing that you can draw your own conclusions about, the IAB has sent an open letter to Neilsen//NetRatings and Comscore to ask them to submit to an independent third-party audit of their measurement methods. From the letter: “We in the marketing-media ecosystem have spent too many years trying to clean up the residue … Read more
Today’s news (so much more interesting than the Google earnings call) is that credit-rating and demographic data provider Experian has bought online competitive data provider Hitwise, for $240m in cash. The rationale for Experian is that Hitwise complements its existing portfolio of marketing services, which mainly lie in the area of data provision for 1:1 marketing … Read more
There’s a lot of chatter on the wires here (ooh, I make it sound so glamorous and newsroom-y – it would be more accurate to say there are a lot of e-mails going back and forth) about Comscore’s press release about cookie deletion. It makes for somewhat alarming reading – according to the report, 31% … Read more
Good luck, Avinash. I think this is a great move – it’s only a shame you’re going to be working with the competition. 🙂
A colleague brought to my attention the dubious practices of LogStats.de, a German provider of free web analytics. LogStats is a typical teeny-tiny provider of free web stats, using a JavaScript-based tag for data collection. Free web stats is a pretty thin business to be in these days, what with behemoths like Google and us … Read more
Ok, forgive the hyperbolic headline, But Omniture’s proving insatiable of late. Last month it gobbled up Instadia; yesterday it announced it was acquiring Touch Clarity, UK-based provider of behaviorally-targeted content delivery systems. In contrast to the Instadia acquisition, Omniture’s press release on the Touch Clarity deal focuses on the complementary nature of the two companies’ … Read more
The latest news from the carnivorous world of web analytics is that Omniture has snapped up Instadia, a Scandinavian web analytics firm. Instadia’s main claim to fame is that their web analytics solution features integrated survey capability – a lead that the rest of the industry has been slow to follow, perhaps for fear of souring … Read more
A little late to the punch with this one, but some interesting numbers were released by Comscore last week which showed that MySpace has beaten Yahoo! in web traffic for the first time. The story behind the story is that Comscore’s measure is based upon page views, and the feeling is that Yahoo! has suffered … Read more