Comscore Measures Blogs (continued)

A couple weeks ago, I got my hands on a presentation that Comscore made to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and posted it on this blog.

I am an investor in and a director of Comscore and have been working with this great company since 1999.  The team at Comscore is constantly pushing the envelope in measuring the Internet.  They were the first to build a megapanel, the first to measure online commerce at the transaction level, the first to measure search, the first to measure streaming audio, the first to build a hispanic panel, etc, etc.

So its not surprising that they are the first to deliver a comprehensive measurement of the blog audience.

I ended my post from several weeks ago with:

As Comscore starts drilling down into the specific blogs, even more data will come out. 

Hopefully they’ll publish it and we can start learning more about what is going on in the blog world.

Well it didn’t take long.  Yesterday Comscore put out "Behaviors of the Blogosphere", by far the most comprehensive analysis of the blog audience that I have seen.

I am not going to cut and paste from the report because its a PDF and that’s a pain in the butt to do (as Jeff Jarvis’ post on this report shows).

And this is just the start.  As Comscore starts to build a dictionary for the blog world and starts to track this emerging part of the Internet, we’ll be treated to even more granular and interesting data.

There are some questionable stats in this report.  Gizmodo over Engadget?  Defamer over Boing Boing?  I have my doubts about some of the blog specific data and the fact that Nick Denton was the co-sponsor of this report begs the question even more. My guess is that Nick provided really good data on his blogs whereas the other blogs were not measured quite so accurately.

But that’s where Comscore is really strong.  They’ll take the feedback they get from this report and drill down and eventually they’ll nail it.

The important story here is that blogs have gotten attention at a major measurement firm.  That’s a big deal and I am glad it’s Comscore leading the pack once again.

#VC & Technology