Around the Net

Digg Founder: Web Measurement System "Broken"

Digg.com founder Kevin Rose launched a scathing attack on Internet audience measurement, calling it "a broken industry." Content providers have long complained that measurement firms like Nielsen Online and comScore, which use panels to measure audience, undercount the traffic that goes to their sites. They argue that this causes advertisers, that rely on third-party data to buy ads, to spend less money with them.

Moreover, there are often sizable discrepancies between the data collected by comScore and Nielsen on the same sites. As Rose says, "There's a lot of confusion and misinformation out there about Web stats and traffic. A lot of really large advertising firms and people that are buying and spending online determine who to advertise on based on things like your ComScore numbers. That system is severely broken." Instead, Rose says that Digg uses Quantcast, which gives publishers a piece of code to embed on every page of your site to verify traffic data.

Separately, the Digg founder touches on the recent launch of Yahoo Buzz, a new Digg-like social news aggregation service. Rose isn't worried about the Yahoo competitor: "Functionality-wise, it's really lacking on the community side," he says.

Read the whole story at CNET News.com »

Next story loading loading..