Comscore IPO

Web traffic aggregator Comscore has filed to go public. They had revenues of $66.3 million in 2006, and about $5.6 million in operating income. It will be interesting to see how they are received. ComScore is a neat company that provides a phenomenal product – definitely the most accurate and well respected traffic measurement source. They have a large panel of folks who give them their demographic information and have downloaded a form of opt in spyware that tracks where they go online. They then can cut their data in very interesting ways to give info to investors that base decisions on web traffic trends, as well as marketers looking for sites that target specific demographics.

While they generate great data, there are inherent flaws in this system, namely that they are only able to track traffic from those that download their spyware. So, their panel is skewed towards those that don’t care about downloading spyware (novice web users) and those that might want to download their app in order to impact the ComScore rankings (webmasters). Matt Cutts of Google has a great post summarizing his view on “an unnamed web metrics businss” and their interactions with Google in the early days here.