comScore is announcing something today that I am quite excited about. It is called Media Metrix Multi Platform and comScore describes it this way in their announcement:
Media Metrix Multi Platform offers unduplicated accounting of audience size and demographics that reflects today’s multi-platform digital media environment, which includes websites, apps and video content accessed from multiple devices.
This "multi platform" environment is the reality of most online properties today. We access them on the desktop/web, the mobile web, and on iOS and Android apps (and some other ways as well). But it has been impossible to get an aggregated and, importantly, an unduplicated view of the audience across all of these devices.
Currently, comScore is only releasing US audience data in the Multi Platform report. They are working on getting their global data into the Multi Platform format and I am even more excited to see those global numbers once they get the data cleaned up and QA'd.
This chart, from comScore's release on the Multi Platform service, tells the story well:
There's a bunch of interesting stuff in there. Take Google. They have 189mm users in the US on desktop/web. They also have 109mm users in the US on iOS and Android. But the unduplicated total audience is 211mm, meaning only 22mm of Google's users are mobile only in the US.
Pandora and Twitter stand out as highly mobile user bases. Pandora's mobile user base is >2x their desktop/web user base. Twitter's mobile user base is almost equal to their desktop/web user base.
If you are a Media Metrix user, you will see the option to get Multi Platform data on your key measures reports. I have been using this service in beta this past week and it is very useful in many ways.
comScore uses a combination of panel data and self reporting by websites and mobile apps to produce its data. The panel data is quite good for large mainstream properties. It is not as great for small websites and apps or services whose audiences are less mainstream and more niche. For those services, self reporting is a good idea and comScore allows you to self report for free by including their tags in your websites and apps.
I hope the entire analytics industry (first party and third party) follows comScore's lead and offers a multi-platform view as the standard view. That's the reality of how users access services today and the analytics industry needs to reflect it in their products.
Disclosure: I was a venture investor in comScore from the late 90s to the mid 00s and was on their board for almost a decade. I still own a few shares personally which I have no intention of selling.
