Comscore

Comscore (proper spelling: comScore ) is an American international internet market research company that publishes regular reports on Internet use.

History

Comscore Networks was founded in August 1999 in Reston (Virginia) by Gian Fulgoni and Magid Abraham. Gian Fulgoni was for many years the CEO of Information Resources, one of the largest market research companies in the world. Magid Abraham was in his mid -90s President of IRI.

The idea to start a business Gian Fulgoni and Magid Abraham had, as they thought with Mike Santer, an investor, a concept to build a large customer panels on the internet for market research in the field of e-commerce. Conventional ways to understand customer behavior on the Internet, could be transferred to the online purchases much less common (2-3%) poorly. To achieve their goal of building a sufficiently large panel, they carried out an aggressive, multi-million dollar and ten -year recruitment. Any errors should be eliminated by sophisticated statistical methods.

In 2000 bought Comscore different areas and customers of PCDATA, one of the first specialized on the WWW market research company. While PCDATA awaited by the changes in competition and patent infringements (suit by Media Metrix ) an uncertain future, Comscore could win more accurate data through their now large customer base.

By 2001 Media Metrix had become the market leader, but was unable to create a stable financial basis. Media Metrix ' fiercest competitor NetRatings had collected larger capital reserves and announced its intention to acquire the company and integrate. After the American FTC (comparable to the Federal Cartel Office ) forbade the acquisition, NetRatings deviated from his plans. In June 2002, eventually took over the company Comscore.

March 30, 2007 Comscore announced to want to go public (NASDAQ, symbol: SCOR).

Criticism

The company interacts with its investigations against, among others AGOF study " internet facts " to. In its home market, the U.S., the company was under pressure as the industry association IAB both Comscore, as well as the competitors Nielsen Netratings had asked for widely varying range numbers to disclose the data collection methods. The determined by Comscore numbers on the calls of Web sites MySpace and Yahoo were also very controversial in the 4th quarter of 2006. Nielsen Netratings provided in this analyzing others numbers.