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Comment by rys | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to trust the comScore number of 1.5M for Recode's traffic. NYT cite comScore in reporting The Verge is 12M uniques a month, but The Verge themselves confirm it's almost exactly twice that in their own story covering the acquisition:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8662905/the-verge-and-reco...

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Quantcast has more accurate metrics for Vox sites (comscore is just guessing, but Quantcast actually gets data from the sites directly).

It reports 81M US visitors/month for the entire Vox network (https://www.quantcast.com/p-d9vfr8QTWnv1E) and 13M for The Verge (https://www.quantcast.com/theverge.com).

That actually lines up pretty closely, so it's likely they were talking about US visitors rather than global (which is ~2x for The Verge).

(Disclaimer: I used to work on Quantcast's measurement product).

Given that Google is reporting 2.5+ million a month uniques (Chartbeat agrees) for us and Quantcast has us at 380k, I'm a little skeptical.

Honestly I expected higher for The Verge but then again I'm an Ars guy myself.

Some publishers chose to put Quantcast's tracking pixel on their websites. These are annotated as as "directly measured". Vox Media is one of those publishers. If you don't chose to share your data with Quantcast, they measure it through toolbars and 3rd party data, so it's only a bad estimation.

Around 25-30% block Ads and probably also tracking pixel, in the US and Europe . I suspect the numbers are probably twice that high on tech news sites. So this alone could probably explain the low estimates.

comscore is notorious for being off by 50% or more.

This is an ad-based business, and it's the standard metric for comparison by ad folks, so it's appropriate to cite here.

Even though it's hilariously inaccurate?

Yes, apples to hilarious apples

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