Comscore: Show us the data or get out of Dodge
The press person at Comscore just hung up the phone on me wow, I guess they are really feeling the heat from putting out such a silly report today. he said they would “deal with this” tomorrow.
This is the great thing about the blogosphere, if you put out something that is wrongor possibly wrongpeople will fact check you real quick,
Now, I don’t know what Comscore was thinking when they printed this datapaid for by Nick Denton and writen by a good friend of Nick Denton’sbut at the very least they should have been more transparent.
Let’s look at a couple of charts. First the visitors to blogs. As you can see Comscore is saying that Fleshbot and Gawker have more visitorsget thisthan Slashdot!
When Rick showed me the data a year ago I saw this immediatley and he told me he agreed that this couldn’t be correct. Well, it’s a year later and Gawker and Fleshbot still do not get Slashdot traffic.
Take a look at the Alexa rankings of these three sites. Now, we all know these are not perfect but they do show the trend well. Fleshbot and Gawker are not even close to Slashdot.
Add to this that Nick’s stat package shows Gizmodo had 5.1M, 4.8 and 5.1M in the first three months of 2005 for a total of 15M visits. Gawker had just 3.5M visits in January and 4M in Feb and March for a total of 11.5M visits in the 1Q of 2005 (not visitors, but visits). The Comscore data put unique visitors for 887K vs. 1.13M.
So, according to this report:
1. Fleshbot and Gawker are bigger then Slashdot.
2. Gawker is 30% bigger than Gizmodo in visitors even though Nick’s visitor stats show that Gawker gets ~76% of the traffic of Gizmdodo.
You can go down the entire list and find examples of how wrong this data istrust me I’m comparing Nick’s traffic logs to our traffic logs and then comparing them to Alexa trends. It’s clear to me that the Comscore data iswellflawed. It can’t even rank Nick’s own blogs!
If Comscore wants to be taken seriously they should do three things:
1. RELEASE THE DATA
2. Tell us how much Gawker and SixApart paid
3. Tell us exactly what their involvement was.
You claim to have 400 blogs and their traffic for the past year? Let’s see it and let’s see it right now. Don’t clean it up give it to us raw. The blogosphere can then compare stat logs and Alexa data and tell you exactly how accurate your sample is.
If you want to be part of the blogosphere you need to brush up on the concept of TRANSPARENCY, because we don’t take kindly to folks coming into our town and talking smack without having backup. 
