MLB.com vs. Nielsen
Back in September, Jose Manuel discussed how neither Comscore nor Nielsen gives reliable data on the Hispanic online market. It seems that the general market websites don’t think much of their efforts either.
The CEO of MLB Advanced Media, which runs MLB.com, attacked Nielsen and said that Nielsen’s reports of MLB.com website traffic are “highly inaccurate” and “has no credible basis” on which to base its reports.
MLB.com is reporting huge discrepancies between its internal server logs and Nielsen’s panel-based metrics. Almost all website publishers say that Nielsen and Comscore sell their traffic short. One side of the argument says that it’s a problem with ad serving technology and websites fudging their numbers. The other side says that Nielsen and Comscore use a faulty panel system that can’t stand up to the light of actual data.
Nielsen in particular has a lot at stake in this fight. If Nielsen’s web usage panel data is not accurate, what does that imply about the TV data that billions of dollars depend on, and have for years? That could be disastrous for both Nielsen and the traditional TV-centric ad industry as a whole.