By Keach Hagey
One of the big downsides of an increasingly mobile online world, so far, is that mobile advertising has been slow to catch up to the amount of time people spend with their smartphones and tablets.
This year, for example, Americans will spend about 11.7% of their daily media consumption with mobile devices, but mobile will only make up 0.9% of advertising spending, according to eMarketer. And because mobile traffic has largely been invisible to publicly available third-party measurement, sites that get a big portion of their traffic from mobile are penalized.
But today, comScore, the main public currency in online audience measurement, rolled out a product that tries to address the problem.
It’s not quite as easy as it sounds.
Websites can’t simply add together the traffic they get on desktops to the traffic they get on smart phones and tablets because multiple devices may be used by a single “unique viewer” – the thing that advertisers are primarily looking for when they look at online traffic metrics. So comScore devised a way to do away with the potential overlap by automatic counting of tagged websites and apps with panels. The result is a new form of measurement called the Media Metrix Multi-Platform, launching today in beta form.
For publishers like BuzzFeed, which get about a third of their traffic from mobile, the change will be a big deal, said BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg.
“Mobile and social are the new starting point, or default, for web use, and comScore is now going to capture this all in one number,” he said. “For media companies like BuzzFeed that have embraced mobile, this is the industry’s 3rd party measurement finally catching up.”
Other winners from the new measurement view include Pandora, which gets more than two thirds of its traffic from mobile, and Twitter, which gets roughly half.
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