Radio Head says comscore is inaccurate
This is a non surprise set of news, that most of the metrics companies from technorati to Alexa and add to that list comscore are hammered on for being inaccurate. The reason why this is so important, is that people set sponsorship rates, set pricing, and other ways of monetizing a blog or web site based on these metrics, if they are wrong, and under report, then the site can not command as much money for advertising as they could or should be charging for advertising space. If comscore is messed up, then there are going to be a whole lot of people who are going to wonder just how accurate any web site metering system is going to be.
A New Music Express piece on Radiohead brings with it a rather large knee to the goolies for comScore, which came out with some numbers on downloads of the band’s “pay what you want” album In Rainbows (I wrote about comScore’s results here). ComScore said that its survey showed less than 40 per cent paid for the album, and most paid less than $4. There was quite a bit of skepticism about the results, however, since — as Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses.com pointed out — it was based on just a few hundred people. Well, here’s what the band said in a statement: Source: Manthewingram.com
Other pundits agree here that the whole thing is not representative of what is happening on the Internet at large. If you believe the metrics from Alexa, we only get 2 people a day, where the reality is many hundreds of times that number, if you believe technorati, we only have some sixty odd links to the site, but there are many more than that, and we are not even on the comscore radar at this point as being too small.
Earlier we had stated that Alexa has some serious issues here, and given what we have seen between the discrepancies between raw log files, and log analysis, along with what is being reported by over the Internet tracking or even the very small sample size of 200 or 400 people, it is just not representative at all of what is really happening. If you want good metrics, you have to get them from the source. Most if not many of the web sites if you ask them will tell you how many people they get, and back it up with a log file analysis. If you ask who knows about Techwag or even radio head the population sample sizes have to be small, but this might be one of those times where you make way too many decisions based on too small a sample size.
If you really want to know, you have to get radio head to show us how many people ordered, and what the average price is, and include the raw data so that people can be sure. Odds are most likely that will not happen, but if it comes down to believing radiohead or comscore, I’ll go with radiohead, they really know what they have seen, comscore does not.
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