Talk:ComScore

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[edit] Article improvements

I wrote the initial (non-stub) version of the article. There are a few things about the article I'm not perfectly happy with, or that I think could be improved:

1. The current article doesn't spell out whether comScore provides a single overarching service, or whether it provides several clearly distinct products and services. Its services are almost certainly related to some extent, since they probably all rely on the underlying 1.5-2 million pool of sampled users, but there may be different classes of end products with important distinctions between them.
2. Some of the (non-historical) references are up to 5 years old. It would be good to get newer sources and make sure the article reflects the current state of the company.
3. The company tends to be a bit secretive about its methods (eg. it's somewhat difficult to definitively determine that comScore is related to its distribution websites OpinionSquare and PermissionResearch; only Ernst & Young's .pdf does this). As a result, I ended up using two flawed .ppt sources. Both are hosted at unreliable URL's (it's not out of the realm of possibility that they're modified by other users, or possibly even faked), and one is marked "proprietary and confidential". Nonetheless, they were found in the wild using only Google, and they broadly concur with with other sources. Still, if better sources could be found for their detailed information, that would be good.

--Interiot 19:05, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

To point # 3 above, the privacy policies on both permissionresearch.com and opinionsquare.com contain the following line: "The information that you contribute is used by comScore Networks, Inc., a U.S.-based market research company that is a nationally-recognized authority on Internet and general economic trends, whose data are routinely cited by major media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and CNBC, and is extensively used by the largest Internet services companies and scores of Fortune 500 companies." --Bibbendum, 4 January 2007

Well, the things that the PPTs clarify/backup are 1) how the proxy servers and RDD are related (though, as the article now notes, the proxy servers may no longer be used), and 2) that comScore directly confirmed geography/income/age from the proxy server data, and 3) that geography/income/age were the pieces of data that were used to correlate the proxy server and RDD data. --Interiot 17:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proxy servers currently used?

The article currently says that comScore no longer uses proxy servers. It would be good to get reliable sources to back this up. The most recent source cited by the article (the Dec 2006 Forbes article) says comScore "takes virtual photos of every Web page viewed by its 1 million participants, even transactions completed in secure sessions", which strongly implies that Forbes thinks comScore has recently been using proxy servers with the man-in-the-middle SSL certs. Has comScore put out a press release about this, or has a mainstream publication covered the change? --Interiot 18:02, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

comScore might be going public, which would hopefully make this information much easier to come by. In its first SEC filing, comScore noted it changed its methodology in 2002, and that it was no longer able to generate all the reports it was previously able to (which caused comScore to lose some customers). [1] However, it also notes that its software is often classified as spyware. That's not an answer to the above question, but hopefully an answer will be coming soon, with more public filings and with the latest news spike. --Interiot 18:29, 3 April 2007 (UTC)