Measuring The Blogs

Note that I didn’t use the word blogosphere in the headline. That’s because I hate that word. Not sure why, but I do.

The news yesterday is that comScore and Federated Media have teamed up to create a custom panel that can be used to measure blogs and social media. That’s a big deal because what we’ve got now isn’t so great.

I can look at my own stats, but they are cookie driven and given the rate of cookie deletion these days, I am sure they are way overcounting unique visitors. And even so, how do I compare my stats to another blog’s stats? There’s Alexa, but we all know the flaws with that service and how it can be gamed.

And the panel-based services like Comscore, Compete, Hitwise, don’t have representative samples of the social media audience so they skew low.

The answer is to build a custom panel of blog readers and people who are active in social media and use that to measure this important and emerging market. And that’s exactly what comScore and Federated Media have done.

Thanks!