Kudos for the detailed response here. I have a further question. As far as I can tell from your comments above, your survey only included home computers. Isn’t it likely that many young people are accessing social networking sites from libraries, schools, universities and internet cafes, rather than solely from home? So wouldn’t your survey tend to underestimate these users?

It’s good that you pledge to make a clearer distinction between “users” and mere “visitors”, but unless you can refrain from misleading “analysis” like this (from your press releases), you will continue to perpetuate false information:
- “MySpace.com has the broadest appeal across age ranges,”
- “There is a misconception that social networking is the exclusive domain of teenagers”
- “Xanga.com is most popular among younger teen”

These conclusions might actually be true, but the data in your study does not support any of them. Your data merely shows that some older people have recently seen the MySpace web site, which does not in any way suggest that those people play any part in the social networking phenomenon, or that MySpace “appeals” to them.

In short, while your data and methodology may be sound and accurate, your actual stated conclusions (which are, of course, the only thing that anyone will actually read and report about) are completely unsupportable. Mr. Jack Flanagan should learn to read his own data.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004212

…Michael

Thank you for allowing us the opportunity of addressing your primary concerns. I’ve left your questions and comments as you wrote them, and highlighted our comments with hash marks (>>>).

1) How do you guarantee who is logged into a particular computer when they visit any of these social sites?

>>> Here is an outline of one of the proprietary methodologies we use to identify who is using a computer at any point in time.

* We obtain explicit permission from our panelists to observe their Internet behavior, and we have the ability to see what they do from the beginning of a session until the conclusion of that session.

In the vast majority of these sessions, there are behavioral indicators (e.g. a username, an email address, etc.) that allow us to passively identify the user and match that user with the specific individuals in the household according to the information provided by the panelist when they first joined the comScore panel.

* For those sessions in which there is no indicator, that data is not included when compiling our age-based data.

* Since we have more than 2 million Internet users in our panel who each engage in dozens of online sessions per month, we have a large sample to report accurately on demographics — even after excluding those sessions from the data set that are not individually identifiable.

* As an ultimate validation of whether or not individuals are being identified correctly, we tabulated our data for single-person households only. The single-person household data revealed an almost identical visitor penetration and page usage pattern for MySpace.com among older age segments as we saw within the multiple-member households, confirming that any potentially inaccurate identification of individuals within multiple-member households (even if it did it exist, which we believe it does not) is not a factor driving the older MySpace.com profile. >> More methodology:

* Every month, we run an enumeration survey based on a random sample of the U.S. population to determine the demographic characteristics of the Internet population. As is done in virtually all sample-based studies conducted in the market research industry, these enumeration data are used to calibrate the comScore panel to ensure it is demographically accurate.

* Our enumeration surveys show that that nearly 40% of the U.S. Internet-using population is in fact between the ages of 35-54.>> Part of the reason why we issued the press release is because the data are so fascinating. It certainly runs counter to the previous conventional wisdom that it’s primarily teenagers who visit MySpace. In this case, we have evidence to illustrate that visitors to social networking sites are actually older than one might expect. We emphasized MySpace because it is the biggest and most newsworthy site.

* Please note that our recent release focused on visitation, and did not comment on usage intensity. In fact, our data does show higher engagement numbers (i.e. higher number of page views) among the younger demos. >> There was no intent to conflate the terms “users” and “visitors”, but now recognizing that there could be confusion we acknowledge that this is a valid critique and something we will be more careful with in the future. Please look at the media coverage this story has generated and for which comScore offered commentary. We have been crystal clear on the distinction between “visitors” and “registered users”. >> Danah, comScore’s methodology has remained consistent, so we believe the age shifts we’re seeing are accurate. Even so, we’ve made sure we did our homework in validating the data before issuing it.

I also want to point out comScore is not the only research company reporting that the MySpace visitor base is aging. In fact, eMarketer published an article today quoting NetRatings data as showing that 46% of the MySpace.com users are now age over 35, compared to 38% last year. NetRatings has a totally separate panel and a different data collection methodology from comScore. Bottom line, two independent databases are reporting that the MySpace visitor base is aging.

We understand the nature of your skepticism, and have answered your questions in detail in an effort to bring more transparency to the situation. We welcome this kind of healthy discussion, and hope it has helped alleviate your concerns about the accuracy of our data.

It seems to me that the following likely scenario would reconcile most of your concerns:

* Youth spend 10x the total time at Myspace as the 35-54 bracket.

* Age brackets visit Myspace as indicated by Comscore.

Thus at any given moment online you’ll have far, FAR more young people on Myspace. However, a simply tally of visitors where time is not material will show comparable visits.

Also, there’s all those 10 year olds who are saying they’re 15 … skews the metrics in the other direction, too.