TECH: ComScore Interview: Gian M. Fulgoni

“India is the fastest growing mobile market in the world”

Gian M. Fulgoni, Co-founder, comScore – one of the world’s most reliable Internet marketing research company – talks to T2C’s Onkar Pandey about the future of Internet in India, the challenges of tracking mobile and how the controversy with respect to the authenticity of measurement data can be put to an end

The web has evolved beyond our imagination. It has become quite uncontrollable and is rapidly changing. Social media has added to the complexity of online user behaviour. How do you – at ComScore – go about measuring the web, considering all its intricacies?

We focus on measuring Internet access based on platforms i.e. the different devices being used to access the web. Right from the beginning, our technology worked really well on computers, whether it was at home or work. However, we realised our measurements could be improved by also getting the server data sent to us directly. Today we have about 80% of the top 100 publishers sending us their server data which we integrate into our panel. Therefore, we can track any activity happening on the Internet through computers, whether it is video, search, buying, entertainment or social networks.


So what’s your major challenge today as far as measurement and ratings in the web space are concerned?
What’s more of a challenge are mobile devices and televisions. In both these cases, there’s an issue of duplication of people’s accounts. But apart from being challenges, these are also major growth opportunities. Today our data is used everywhere, and we work hard at it. We have a group which directly interacts with the media, providing them with all possible forms of data and figures we come out with. Globally, from print to TV to web, we get 350 impressions of our data per day in the media.


What is your state of presence and operations in India?
When I said that tracking mobile is a challenge and an opportunity as well, I was referring to markets like India, which as you know is the fastest growing mobile market in the world and will soon reach a billion devices. One of the reasons I visited India was to get a better idea of the demand here for different types of measurements, including mobile devices (though we are not doing mobile measurement in India yet). Having started operations here just about two years ago, we have introduced only a fraction of our portfolio in India. It’s doing very well. In fact it’s the fastest growing market for us globally, and we are ready to bring in the rest of our offerings too. Right now, we need to figure out how we’ll do that as we further establish the comScore brand.

One of the problems and controversies around the rating and measurement systems is that there is always someone to doubt it. How are you ensuring, at comScore, that there’s lesser controversy and more acceptance of measurement data in general?
As far as data is concerned, there has always been a controversy between third party independent trackers and media properties. Although a larger audience is always better, it just provides more fuel for disagreement. And it has become worse on the web because the websites have their own computers churning out something. But those are not unique visitors. The servers simply count the number of cookies (an identification point on the browser) on the computers. Authenticity comes in once cookies are deleted and only one person is associated with one cookie. But that’s not the way it works. We have now started tracking this across the world – only 30% of the computers have their cookies deleted in a month (about 3-6 times a month). This means that website servers are overstating their visitor base by 2 to 2.5 times and that is causing a lot of friction when it comes to all the talk around measurements. Therefore, educating people about the cookie issue is extremely important. Then there is another issue. I have a work computer and a computer at home. So I access in the morning from my home computer; then go to office and visit it again. The WSJ server says it got two visitors, which in reality is only one. That’s where we bring in our expertise; we count people and not the cookies.

How do you see the Internet shaping up in India?
The growth rate in India is around 12-13%. A very large set of users access the net from cyber cafes and there are less of home users. There’s a very young audience here. So there’s a huge opportunity to grow as the web evolves.