It’s amazing how renowned publishers will do anything – and I mean anything, including doing an ‘item number’ on reputed traffic sources just to try and get noticed (?) and trick gullible advertisers into parting with their bucks.
Case in point? I was just sent this ad that was published in a media news portal today.
Now, why the heck am I interested in this business in the first place? It’s because I am the sole investor in Koimoi.com – a Bollywood portal that’s amongst India’s Top 3 Bollywood digital destinations.
I fell down laughing when I saw this chart 🙂
- While Bollywoodhungama.com is a close competitor to Koimoi, we track them carefully and respect their early lead in the business.
As per the Indianexpress.com ad, Bollywoodhungama.com has ZERO (I mean 0) Mobile Traffic?? How on earth can anyone with any brains even print something like this?
All digital portals today have a 60/40 or now even a 70/30 share of Mobile Web to Desktop traffic and so this ‘comScore’ branded data point of 0 traffic just makes me LOL.
2. The MOST HILARIOUS part of the ad is the manner in which DISTINCT Web and Mobile numbers have been very conveniently ADDED UP to provide a TOTAL of Unique Visitors! Even Lalloo Yadav will pull out a couple of his ear hair shoots and tell you that you can’t just ‘Add Up’ desktop and mobile users while reporting them monthly, ‘coz there is a significant overlap between them when they visit a particular site!
To drive home the comparative point, I turn to Alexa (yeah – I know it’s old and scrappy and soooooo 90s…) BUT my argument is simple – if the Alexa data is stale or incorrect, then EVERYONE on the Alexa chart will look stupid. The other argument against Alexa.com is that it’s a very “India” centric web traffic measurement tool because it was adopted early on by Indians, somewhere in the late 90s. In this particular case, the Indian bias (if at all) works ‘coz we are comparing Indian sites.
So, what does Alexa throw up?
Bollywoodlife, Koimoi and Bollywoodhungama all jostling for 1,2 and 3 spots as they have been doing for years now. To make sure I am fair to the comparison, I threw in the other sites quoted by the Indianexpress advertisement into the Alexa pool. Their numbers are there to see.
3. It’s funny how super large publishers compare themselves with smaller niche verticals when it suits them 🙂 (In this case to sell Bollywood space).
I compared Indianexpress.com to the larger fish out there and got this 🙂
I am serious about such occurrences and sent this mail a few minutes back to the comScore and Indian Express team. I await their comments
*****
Take for instance the numbers of Bollywood Hungama – How can comScore numbers for Mobile be 0??
Also, how can desktop and mobile numbers be added up and shown as ‘Total UNIQUE’?? What about the common numbers between the desktop and mobile?
Reporting like this does not help the industry at all. It just ruins credibility and disrupts the nuances of uniform reporting!
Takeaways?
