From SEC S-1. June 12, 2007 (excerpt):
“The interactive nature of digital media on the Internet enables businesses to access a wealth of user information that was virtually unavailable through offline audience measurement and marketing intelligence techniques. Digital media provide businesses with the opportunity to measure detailed user activity, such as how users interact with Web page content; to assess how users respond to online marketing, such as which online ads users click on to pursue a transaction; and to analyze how audiences and user behavior compare across various Web sites. This type of detailed user data can be combined with demographic, attitudinal and transactional information to develop a deeper understanding of user behavior, attributes and preferences… Our products and solutions offer our customers deep insights into consumer behavior, including objective, detailed information regarding usage of their online properties and those of their competitors, coupled with information on consumer demographic characteristics, attitudes, lifestyles and offline behavior.
Our digital marketing intelligence platform is comprised of proprietary databases and a computational infrastructure that measures, analyzes and reports on digital activity. The foundation of our platform is data collected from our comScore panel of more than two million Internet users worldwide who have granted us explicit permission to confidentially measure their Internet usage patterns, online and certain offline buying behavior and other activities. By applying advanced statistical methodologies to our panel data, we project consumers’ online behavior for the total online population and a wide variety of user categories…
Unlike offline media such as television and radio, which generally only allow for the passive measurement of relative audience size, digital media enable businesses to actively understand the link between digital content, advertising and user behavior.”
PS:Â The S-1 also notes that “[O]ur database infrastructure currently captures approximately 182 million Web pages and 4.5 billion URL records each week from our global Internet panel, resulting in over 28 terabytes of data collected by our platform each month.”
