Facebook Sees Flood Of New Traffic
comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released the results of a study on the visitation to Facebook.com …
Context & Ripple Effects
This study is one output of a deliberate build-out by comScore through the first half of 2007: a new Visits metric announced in March, the monthly qSearch rankings released in May, and the Widget Metrix service launched in June to track distributed widget usage. Applying that fresh measurement apparatus to Facebook.com extends it into social networking, the fastest-moving corner of the audience-measurement business.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains third-party validation of its traffic surge from a NASDAQ-listed measurement firm — the kind of audited audience data its advertising sales effort depends on.
- comScore gets a marquee showcase for the metrics it has been rolling out all year, marketing its methodology to media buyers at the moment social-network audiences are up for grabs.
Second-order effects
- Every major social network and portal now competes inside the same comScore rankings, which makes measurement methodology itself a commercially contested asset rather than neutral bookkeeping.
- Advertisers weighing budget shifts toward social networks are handed a common yardstick, sharpening comparisons between Facebook and incumbent destinations for display spend.
Third-order effects
- If one firm's panels and metrics become the de facto currency for social-network audiences, measurement methodology quietly becomes a gatekeeper of web advertising economics — and disputes over whose numbers are right become structural, not incidental.
The trend: Web measurement firms are converting raw social-network traffic into audited advertising currency as brand budgets move online.