Omniture & comScore Join Forces for Good Measure!
It seems that getting itself acquired by Adobe isn’t enough to keep the web analytics giant Omniture busy. It has announced today that it will partner with the Boy That Cried Wolf comScore to unify online audience metrics.
Joking aside, it looks like a peanut butter/chocolate moment for the world of online audience measurement. The partnership will see comScore combine the data it gets from a 2 million person global panel with Omniture’s–raise pinky to side of mouth–1 trillion quarterly web site transactions. According to the announcement:
This strategic partner relationship blends these two methodologies in a highly automated way to create a unified approach for audience measurement designed to enable publishers to represent themselves in a more comprehensive manner to advertisers, and for advertisers to better optimize their media planning with the benefit of more extensive media reach data.
That’s a fancy way of saying the data is going to be a lot more accurate from here on out. As Josh James, Omniture CEO and co-founder puts it, "With this relationship, Omniture and comScore will enable publishers who have rich, highly targeted audience segments to reliably demonstrate their value to advertisers and also help advertisers find these attractive consumer segments. The combined offering will provide advertisers and publishers with a common currency to measure the value of online audiences across an ever-increasing number of digital channels."
So what does this mean for publishers and advertisers? I like how Scott McDonald, SVP Research, Conde Nast Publications explains how it will help (in theory):
"For more than a decade, we have fretted about – and sometimes quarreled about — the discrepancies between the audience estimates derived from third-party panels like comScore’s and those derived from web site analytics systems like Omniture’s. This collaboration represents the most significant effort to date to harmonize the two approaches and give the industry, at last, a common and convergent set of numbers."
It’s a real kumbaya moment for the measurement world. Now we just need to see if the two ingredients can combine to make something as tasty as a Reese’s cup!
What do you think of this partnership?
Facebook Sued for Stifling Competition, Click Fraud
It’s a saga we’re all familiar with by now: create a pretty awesome web service, start a trend, become a media sweetheart, make lots of money (VC or acquisition), get slapped with a lawsuit. Or two. Or fifty billion. Facebook added two more lawsuits to its heap recently: a countersuit from Power.com and a click fraud proceeding.
Facebook filed suit against Power.com in December. Facebook claimed the one-stop social-media aggregator was infringing upon their copyright, violating their TOS and scraping proprietary data. At the time, we weren’t sure whether “proprietary data” included user information.
Power.com finally decided not to take this sitting down. TechCrunch reports that Power.com has now filed a countersuit, claiming Facebook is “unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS), and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services like Power.com to access the data, among other things.”
Facebook also faces legal action from RootZoo, an erstwhile advertiser. After analytics from their Nov 2007-June 2008 campaign varied greatly from Facebook’s reported data, RootZoo requested Facebook’s logs and a refund. Facebook said no to both.
RootZoo’s complaint uses 2 June 2008 as an example of the discrepancies between the two. While Facebook reported 804 clicks on their ads, RootZoo’s analytics programs show 300 clicks from the social networking giant.
While there have been rumblings about Facebook click fraud for some time, this is the first suit in the matter.
What do you think? Does Facebook have anything to worry about from these legal claims against it? Is there anyway to avoid getting slapped with lawsuits once people see you’re making some money?
