ComScore ranks AltaVista last in traffic among the top eight portals in December, but tops in attracting the heaviest Internet buyers
chicagotribune.com
COMSCORE WILL CHALLENGE NET
ASSUMPTIONS
Barbara Rose
January 25, 2001
The voice on the other end of CEO Gian Fulgoni's phone crackled with static
and fury.
The caller demanded to know whether Fulgoni had seen the morning's Wall
Street Journal.
He hadn't yet.
Did he know where the caller was headed ?
He didn't.
The caller said he was on a jet to Mexico City to close the sale of his hosiery
company. The Journal had a big headline: Hoisery market in free fall.
Its source for that conclusion: Chicago market research firm Information
Resources Inc., where Fulgoni was CEO.
What did Fulgoni have to say for himself, the caller demanded?
"Maybe they haven't seen the paper in Mexico?" he offered tentatively.
This week, Fulgoni will resume tossing information bombs into the market--this
time aimed at throwing light on buying behavior on the Internet.
His 18-month-old firm, ComScore Networks (www.comscore.com), founded
with another former IRI top exec, Magid Abraham, will begin posting data
collected from the computers of some 1.5 million people in 250 countries.
No doubt, some of the numbers will rankle.
For instance, ComScore's data suggest that some of the most-popular Web
sites--those with the most visitors--aren't necessarily the place to be if your
goal is to sell something.
All those millions of freeloaders swapping music files on Napster?
They're among the Internet's cheapest cheapskates. They spend less online
than the millions of people who visit so-called "adult" sites, another set of
cheapskates.
Want big Internet spenders? Go to the travel sites. Their visitors spend more on
the Internet (though not necessarily on travel) than the visitors to any other
Web site category.
Yahoo, the most-visited portal, attracts people who spend less on the Internet
than, say, AltaVista's visitors.
ComScore ranks AltaVista last in traffic among the top eight portals in
December, but tops in attracting the heaviest Internet buyers.
"All this focus on eyeballs has led people astray," Fulgoni says.
He should know. Few entrepreneurs are as good at keeping their eyes focused
on where consumer dollars go.
Born in the hills of northern Italy and raised in England, Fulgoni played semi-pro
soccer and got a physics degree before moving to the U.S., the birthplace of
modern consumer marketing.
He took to his new field as easily as he slips behind the wheel of a Porsche.
(He owns four.)
When IRI founder John Malec rang him up one day in the early 1980s, their
conversation was brief. "Hi Gian, this is John, how would you like to be
president of IRI?"
Upstart IRI challenged Nielsen Marketing Research, its bitter archrival for
years, by reporting not what people say they buy, but what they actually
purchase based on data captured by bar code scanners.
ComScore's goal is similar. But the firm needed a huge sample to get
meaningful results because only 2 percent of all Web visits result in purchases.
ComScore's participants agree to download software that reconfigures their
computer browsers. ComScore's servers record their every move, at home and
at work.
(Employers, take note: Twice as much buying occurs on workplace computers
as at home.)
The firm's virtual warehouse already has stored more than two terabytes of
data, or the equivalent of a library with 200,000 books. It's adding more than
60,000 records per minute, 600 million records per week.
That's enough information to make even a glutton for data like Fulgoni
speechless.
Meanwhile, Gian, better stay away from the phone. |
