Comscore, a reference meter in the Spanish market, published this Monday the audience data for the month of December with an alert for its users: "Due to a labeling incident, in December 2019, Elmundo.es Sites and Elmundo.es have been underestimated. " Underestimated means that the data of 18.8 million unique users offered by the meter is far from the actual figure harvested by this means in the last month of the year.
The error that Comscore recognizes would be the result of a failure in the labeling that affected AMP traffic (mobile traffic from search engines such as Google) generated by EL MUNDO during the past month. AMP is one of the most important traffic sources of any medium, but it is especially important in months like December because of the impact of the Christmas Lottery draw there.
It is not a mistake that is limited to the month of December, although Comscore has only released the alert for this month and after the claim of THE WORLD to see the inconsistency of the October and November data . In these two months, this same labeling problem has already impacted, which in reality consists in the fact that the terms in which the meter collects the data of the media changed at that time, causing a significant bleeding of users among those who arrived via AMP .
Most audience measurement systems work through a panel or representative sample of users. The person in charge of the measurement follows in detail the consumption habits of these users and extrapolates the results to the total population.
However, the model that Comscore uses requires, in addition to this panel, a census measurement that encompasses all users and requires a joint technical work with each of the media that are part of the ranking. Any impact on this complementary data collection (such as that which has occurred in recent months with EL MUNDO) can seriously affect the quality of the results. The Cope Chain already suffered this same problem three months ago and in March, Comscore had to rectify its data and subtract two million users from 'La Vanguardia' and 'ABC' .
This explains to a large extent the sharp change in the ranking of unique users offered by the meter, where EL MUNDO and 'El País', which historically had alternated leadership at a great distance from other media, have become third and fourth, behind 'La Vanguardia' and 'ABC'.
In contrast to this section of unique users, EL MUNDO continues to lead the rankings of visits and page views at a great distance from the rest of the media , demonstrating the inconsistency of a ranking in which the user is counted the same as passing once by a web, than the appellant. That is, premium users in front of readers. In EL MUNDO, however, he placed the reader at the center of his strategy , with the aim of launching his payment model last October .
In visits , EL MUNDO is a leader with 164 million visits in December despite the significant impact of underestimation this month, with a million and a half advantage over 'El País', the only real competitor. 'ABC', third in this section, is more than 43 million. And 'La Vanguardia', to more than 62 million .
The ranking is the same if you look at the page views (total views): THE WORLD is leading with 388 million , with an advantage of 50 million over 'El País' (338). 'ABC' and 'La Vanguardia' are already more than 100 million away.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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