The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Comscore Media BuzzFeed

Business Insider disputes ComScore traffic metrics

Author

By John Glenday, Reporter

November 1, 2016 | 2 min read

Business Insider has disputed a ComScore estimate of its audience reach suggesting that its monthly reach was just 100m, by publishing its own breakdown of the figures showing a monthly audience of 328m.

The huge discrepancy is being attributed to the publisher’s pursuit of audiences beyond its own website by distributing articles on other platforms, principally Facebook. In this Business Insider is far from alone, with BuzzFeed voicing similar protestations.

In a blog post BuzzFeed claimed that its true audience figures were closer to 400m than the 80m official figure quoted by ComScore, when all these secondary outlets are totted up.

In a bid to combat similar issues in the TV industry Comscore has already partnered with Viacom to improve its cross-platform measurements.

The so-called distributed strategy is seeing publishers target social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter and Snapchat in a bid to gain a slice of their vast audiences.

Julie Hansen, president and chief operating officer at Business Insider, said: “There's just this kind of growing frustration. There are so many platforms with so many people, yet they're not reflected in the numbers."

ComScore is an important third party arbiter of engagement for publishers and advertisers, providing independent confirmation of this key metric.

Comscore Media BuzzFeed

More from Comscore

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +