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On Wednesday, veteran journalist and blogger Om Malik posted a provocative question: Facebook Traffic Tanks - This can't be real?
comScore is about to issue September 2007 user engagement and page views data, and ... there seems to be a 9.3% decline in [Facebook's] unique visitors from 33.75 million in August 2007 to 30.6 million in September 2007. Even their page views are down 3.8% from August 2007. (See chart.)
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Why would that happen to both Facebook [and Classmates] ahead of back-to-school season? It just doesn’t make any sense!
Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim pointed out that it's a seasonal blip that showed up in Hitwise data last year. Great catch, but still doesn't explain why apparent traffic should drop when usage is almost certainly growing.
Yesterday Om filled in the details:
Paul Sutter, co-founder & president of Quantcast explains that the dip we are seeing is because of the panel model adopted by comScore. ComScore has a panel that has a bias toward Internet users who log on from home. The same is true of all measurement panels - Nielsen, Hitwise or Quantcast. As kids go back to school, they vanish from the panel, even though they are still using Facebook, from school dorms.
(Quantcast supplements their panel with direct measurement, which we use.)
As I said earlier today when defending comScore and Reuters:
Every source for data on page views, visits, unique visitors, links, and time spent is flawed. But imperfect data is better than no data.
Gathering and organizing data is part of the central mission of Blogcosm; perhaps I should add the above to a footer that runs on every page. I'm not picking on comScore here, the point is to take all site data with a grain of salt. Please add a comment if you have other specific examples.
Blog profile: GigaOm
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On Monday, Barry Ritholtz sounded the alarm at The Big Picture:
Soon to be worthless: Nielsen Net Ratings and comScore Media Metrix
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"All traffic to your blog will then be assigned as traffic to __."
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I have now seen this or similar demands from 3 separate mainstream media outlets: A wire service (Reuters), a financial magazine, and a major newspaper. In all three examples that I reviewed, the blog itself isn't transferred or sold to the media outlet
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Let's consider the ramifications:
1) This is nothing short of a naked grab to steal Blog traffic numbers, and artificially boost MSM web traffic numbers.
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2) Nielsen Net Ratings and comScore Media Metrix data are soon to be -- assuming they are not already -- worthless bull$h%t. If these ratings companies are complicit in this arrangement -- or if they even know and tolerate it -- their business model goes kaput. Since major MSMedia are attempting to buy ratings, these rating will no longer accurately measure true traffic.
My take:
As discussed yesterday when covering the Reuters invite, I think very few bloggers are in a position to turn their Nielsen or comScore data into cash. The advertisers who subscribe to these expensive services are looking for the sort of scale that a large site (or network of sites) can provide.
Every source for data on page views, visits, unique visitors, links, and time spent is flawed. But imperfect data is better than no data. While it's often useful to have specific data per site, if the ad is going to run across a whole network then that's the data that matters to the advertiser.
Valleywag often plays the role of breathless critic, but in this case Owen Thomas is a voice of reason:
At times, there's nothing more amusing than watching a blogger in the middle of a meltdown. Barry Ritholz, the CEO of stock-research firm Fusion IQ, has apparently been seized by panic over an interesting, but unthreatening, development: Big media companies getting into the business of selling ads for blogs. They've already built up an expensive ad sales force, and often find it difficult to grow traffic on their websites faster than their salespeople can sell it. A natural solution: Approach blogs covering similar topics and offer to sell ads on their sites, sharing the revenue.
Lots more details in Owen's post, including a comment by Barry.
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