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The Technorati conundrum

Technorati's recent surge in visitors ought to make the blog search engine more attractive to advertisers and, given the assumption investors would sell if they could secure some kind of return, to potential acquirors. There's just one problem. The inhouse figures touted by Technorati founder Dave Sifry, show more than 9m unique visitors in March -- up an unbelievable 141% in three months. Impressive -- till one checks the reference source for advertisers. Comscore estimates the Mobius-backed San Francisco venture, which faces growing competition from larger search engines such as Google, was visited by just 1.2m US internet users in February, down from a year before. One can question the Comscore numbers: its panel tends to undercount geeky users of browsers such as Firefox and the Mac's Safari; and the results can be erratic. But, if a company is serious about internet advertising revenue, and audience statistics, it can't simply ignore a measure that media buyers rate above a site's own claims. For the contradictory charts, and a response from Sifry, read on:


Dave Sifry responds: I have no idea what the comscore numbers show, we aren't subscribers - however, I did have a long talk with their CEO back in Davos, and he readily admitted that their numbers are woefully inaccurate for the Web 2.0 and Social media part of the web. We discussed working together, but we do not currently have a formal relationship.

2:23 PM on Tue Apr 3 2007
By Nick Denton
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4 comments