ComScore/Announcement

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

As many of you may know, we have been using comScore’s data to measure unique visitors since 2009. The relationship has been pro bono, and we have benefited from knowing our visitor traffic and our ranking among other top websites.

We are choosing to stop reporting comScore’s numbers on our site because of limitations in the methodology. Given Wikimedia’s global, increasingly mobile audience, we feel that comScore’s data is no longer fully representative of our traffic. For us, comScore’s strength has been in measuring traffic from desktop and Global North users. However, we don’t feel comScore’s data, which is based on panels, sufficiently reflects our traffic in other regions and on mobile. While they do offer a more accurate unified report methodology, we haven’t used this approach because it requires sending usage data via a tracking beacon to their servers. Wikimedia does not opt into this third-party system as part of its commitment to user privacy.

With this change, we will no longer be citing comScore in our outbound messages, like the Wikimedia Foundation Quarterly Report.