Looks like comScore is getting some unwanted attention yet again about once of its aliases, voiceFive, under which it installs software to track user behavior online. I believe it is lame that they do this under several different names and attempt to hide the identity of the company gathering the information. Voicefive.com is all good according to McAfee SiteAdvisor, yet there are quite a few angry comments to be found about them on the same page…

And their CPM number seems very high. See release here.

Based on my estimates, I’d guess they came in about 50% on the impressions numbers and about doubled the CPM. But then what do I know?

My guess is around 24.1 billion impressions a day whereas theirs comes in around 12.2 billion a day (or around a trillion in the US for the first quarter). $2.48 as a CPM is high; the true number is quite probably in the $1.00 to $1.50 range. Especially when you look at Facebook - the CPMs there for an ad unit are in the $0.20 range on the higher end and if you look at three ads or max four ads per page, that’s $0.60-$0.80 or so.

Would love other people’s thoughts on this, back of the envelope or not.

I’ve been seeing voicefive.com loading everywhere so wanted to see who this is — according to domaintools.com their nameservers are all .comscore.com - so it looks like this is another “unbranded” comscore domain. According to the voicefive.com website:

VoiceFive Networks is a leading global market research company that studies and reports on Internet trends and behavior. VoiceFive Networks is routinely commissioned to conduct research on numerous topics of concern to industry leaders in diverse fields, including travel, pharmaceuticals, and publishing.

The usual giveaways are their privacy policy address, and of course the nameservers. Then of course, the repetition of wording - if you do a google search you’ll see “a leading global market research company that studies and reports on Internet trends and behavior” also includes “Full Circle Studies” (http://www.fullcirclestudies.com) and their “ScorecardResearch … domain used by Full Circle Studies, Inc. to help with the collection of Internet web browsing data on specific websites that have enrolled in a broad market research effort to create reports on Internet behavior and trends.” We’ve seen b.scorecardresearch.com before which is the beaconing URL that comscore is using for reconciling its panel numbers with the higher site-measured figures.

Lots of discussion around the comScore $10k fee for measurement, most notably initiated by Jason Calacanis. I happened to stumble across some interesting data along these lines. It appears that the URL used by the beaconing program is b.scorecardresearch.com (the domain is owned by TMRG, Inc., “an organization dedicated to managing a leading market research community comprised of millions of Internet and mobile consumers from around the globe. The data generated from this community is used to help companies understand trends and patterns online and on the mobile Internet.” TMRG is a service of comScore, so they say.

A few things about this all seemed strange for comScore to say for example that they needed people to subsidize creating this data/storing it; that you needed to pay more for better data and so on. Also that you needed to pay to help them “audit the data” to make sure tags were not incorrectly placed on multiple sites. That’s BS too — any system will be smart enough to make sure it’s only counting pages with the correct URL basis/referrer. But anyway, I digress. The data is worth looking at.

This appears to be the format similar to this <img src=”http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6662697&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c15=&cj=1″ />. Anyway, I just aggregated some of the data around various IDs we saw randomly while looking at other data. Here they are for you to do with as you will, in a scribd format.

Scorecard Research - comscore