ComScore Vs Radiohead: Are Download Stats A Creep, A Weirdo?
By Robert Andrews - Fri 09 Nov 2007 01:01 AM PST
ComScore (NSDQ: SCOR) has been forced to defend its important metrics on Radiohead’s new pay-what-you-like album download. As we posted, stats out Monday showed 1.2 million people visited the In Rainbows site in October and 38 percent of those who downloaded In Rainbows actually paid money - an average of $6 but $2.26 when the remaining freeloaders are factored in (here’s comScore’s detail).
Warner Bros Records senior technology director Ethan Kaplan quickly savaged comScore’s methodology, which included only a “few hundred” in the study. Yesterday, Radiohead issued their own statement calling the figures “purely speculative”: “As the album could only be downloaded from the band’s website, it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales. The figures quoted by the company comScore Inc are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”
Then last night comScore marketing manager and analyst Andrew Lipsman posted a lengthy blog entry in defence, stating the agency uses “a representative sample of two million internet users”, which he said this time was “nearly one thousand” (though that later became “hundreds"): “When we observe an e-commerce transaction in our panel, the value we observe represents the actual price paid by that consumer ... If we didn’t have a reasonable sample from which to extrapolate, we wouldn’t have released the data. But we did, and we’re confident in what the data showed.”
None of the metrics agencies can agree on site popularity anyway (see our earlier post on why UK social network table differ across each). Nielsen Online observed to paidContent:UK in September that comScore data (derived from installing monitoring software on machines of users aged over 15) can be skewed toward older teens and heavy web users because it uses online polling only and because that software is often embedded in poppy downloads like screensavers and games.
Attempts to gauge take-up are important because this is a somewhat new pricing model and thanks, comScore, for trying but it’s probably true - stats that use representative samples rather than true numbers won’t give us as accurate a picture of Radiohead’s success as Radiohead’s own numbers. With In Rainbows releases on physical formats in the new year, we may yet see such figures.
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