Comscore vs Hitwise - Myspace vs Youtube - Who is Winning?
Marketwatch just published a story that talks about a comscore report that states that Myspace has overtaken YouTube and Yahoo for video’s served. Myspace apparently served over 1.4 billion videos in July.
I’m somewhat skeptical of this as Hitwise reported that YouTube Served 2.5 Billion videos in June?
These competing research company numbers just don’t jibe, does anyone have any insight into methodology here?
UPDATE: i did a little research and found an article that lays out how these companies are very different in their approach:
ComScore on the other hand has a panel of people who opt in to be 100% monitored as they surf the web (by ComScore installing monitoring software on their Panel Member’s computers and then funneling 100% of the surfing via their proxy servers).
These different approaches give them a wildly different base of users to draw from:
Per ComScore their global network is 2 million (though the Media Metrix audience measurement is 120k US panelists and Media Matrix Global services is 500k outside the US).
Personally it sounds like Hitwise has a much better sample size to draw on for quantitative estimates, especially when we’re talking about such enormous numbers here.
UPDATE: A very interesting “open letter” from the CEO of Comscore on the issues of panel based statistics vs server logs.
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
Gavin Heaton
Yes, my understanding of Hitwise is that they have a substantial and statistically strong sample size. Their service (if you can afford it) is pretty close to real-time … so you can launch your online program and then see, next day, how it is performing.
Sep 27th, 2006
Dave Surface (SL)
Comscore consistantly under reports. Additionally, page tracking issues with MySpace has been written up in recent months due to their methods. Their page views can sometimes count 1 hit as 4. Be skeptical…
Sep 27th, 2006
karl long
Thanks for the additional notes guys and confirming my skepticism
Sep 27th, 2006
Reply to “Comscore vs Hitwise - Myspace vs Youtube - Who is Winning?”