No Conflict, No Interest
That’s a John Doerr quote that I often use. And this post reeks of conflict of interest. So I’ll disclose that right upfront. I am an investor in both Indeed and comScore.
TechCrunch has a post up about Indeed’s competitor Simply Hired’s use of WhenU to drive traffic to it’s service. Until recently, Indeed had about three times the audience of Simply Hired. In the past couple months, Simply Hired’s numbers have been on a sharp increase. Now there are a bunch of services in the jobs space on the web. So it’s not necessarily a good thing to focus on just Simply Hired and Indeed. There are a lot of places to go to find jobs on the web. But I personally think the job search services like Indeed are the best way to find a new job.
What’s most interesting to me about this post is not the question of whether popups/popunders are a good audience acquisition strategy (it is not). It’s whether UVs seen by virtue of popups/popunders should count in a service’s UV count.
It seems that Compete, Alexa, Hitwise, and possibly other third party tracking services count that kind of traffic. And it seems that comScore doesn’t. If that is in fact true, then it’s one more reason why comScore’s data is better.