Comscore is at fault again says Bartz

WEBSITE TRAFFIC COUNTER Comscore is at fault again, according to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, because it doesn't recognise email pageviews on mobile phones.

In Yahoo's third quarter earnings call Bartz pointed to the fact that Comscore's system for counting pageviews, all important for Yahoo to sell advertising space, does not include pageviews for the company's email feature.

Bartz's SVP of search and marketplaces, Shashi Seth took Comscore to task earlier this month for its accounting and Google Instant. He wrote in a blog posting that Comscore's claim of Google's query growth increases in September came from its Instant's search engine generating multiple search results per search query and not genuine searches. Google Instant generates predictive text search results with each new letter entered.

Seth seems to be taking a cue from his boss Bartz, who started giving Google business advice back in April. Then Bartz said that Google was too focused on its search business, apparently not realising that that company reports revenues many times greater than Yahoo's. Last week it reported $7.29 bilion in revenue in the third quarter, a rise of 23 per cent year on year. For the third quarter Yahoo had $1.6 billion in revenue, which was a staggering increase of two per cent year on year.

During the third quarter earnings teleconference Bartz said, "Many mail users check in all day long on their mobile and that is not counted by Comscore as a mail page view."

Part of the answer to that issue, according to Bartz, was to make sure its webpages could be viewed by anyone using any screen size device. But does Comscore know?

Bartz declined to talk about a possible private equity buyout of Yahoo, which would have made the earnings call a bit more interesting. µ