Last week, following two grueling weeks as a part of comScore’s IPO roadshow team, I spoke at the ARF’s Audience Measurement 2.0 conference in New York. Bob Barocci, the ARF President, had organized a panel to address the issue of “Internet Media Measurement.” My fellow panelists, representing third-party measurement firms, industry-leading end-users of the data and publishers, were Lynn Bolger (VP, Advertising & Sales Insights at Yahoo!), Beth Uyenco (Global Research Director, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions) and Mainak Mazumdar (Chief of Measurement Science at Nielsen//NetRatings). Our moderator was Mike Shields, Senior Editor at Mediaweek magazine.

Our discussion covered a wide range of topics, but chief among them were the following:

1. A recognition of the inflation in site-server counts of unique U.S. visitors caused by cookie deletion, unfiltered bots and spider traffic and the failure to accurately exclude International traffic. (If you would like more information on this subject, the comScore cookie deletion white paper is now publicly available here.)

2. An acknowledgment of the critical role that third party panels play in helping the Internet industry measure the ROI of Internet marketing. Online advertising is beginning to be used as a brand-building strategy and to accurately measure its impact requires the ability to monitor consumer behavior over time and across channels (especially offline) – measurement challenges that panels are uniquely suited to address but which site servers cannot. It was noted that online advertising, while growing at a 30%+ annual pace today, still only accounts for about 5% of all U.S. ad spending. Much of the 95% that remains offline can be viewed as advertising that is intended to deliver multiple ad impressions to consumers. Because of the deletion of third-party ad serving cookies, panels are needed to accurately compute reach and frequency.

3. A concern that today’s auditing methodologies (such as that employed by the MRC) may force premature standards to emerge and make it impossible to measure future innovation – which seems to be occurring on a daily basis in the Internet industry. Lynn Bolger had an interesting observation, likening the situation to “standing in quicksand.”

I enjoyed being a part of the panel and contributing to a lively discussion. My thanks to Bob Barocci and the ARF for inviting me to participate.

Hello, my name is Jamie Gavin, and I am the newest member of the comScore marketing and communications team based in our London office. As an Englishman, I am obviously a MASSIVE football (no, NOT soccer!) fan, and what better time to make the trip across the Atlantic than on the tailcoats of one of the greatest Englishmen to ever play the game. David Beckham, or ‘Bex’ as we call him on the other side of the pond, has just signed a deal reported to be worth over $250 million with US “soccer” team LA Galaxy, and for what it’s worth, here are my two cents.

In 2005, the Guardian ran an excerpt entitled “When Pele and Cosmos were Kings" from Gavin Newsham’s book Once in a Lifetime. It told the story of everything from the media frenzy surrounding Pele's arrival, to the meteoric rise of the sport in America, and eventually to Pele’s final game for the club. Apparently as the game progressed, the heavens opened, drenching the entire 75,000 congregation. The next day a Brazilian newspaper ran the headline: "Even the Sky Was Crying."

But now the US has a new football hero – a modern hero – who is proving just as popular on the Internet as he ever was on the football field. According to comScore data, when Beckham announced in January that he would be signing for the LA Galaxy club, worldwide traffic to the Major League Soccer website increased by over 250%. The number of unique visitors to the site in January 2007 reached 808,000, up from 230,000 in December 2006.

Exactly half of this traffic came from within the United States, with the number of unique visitors from the U.S. in January increasing to 404,000 from 159,000 the previous month. As a new year began, American eyes were undoubtedly on David Beckham.

As a youngster growing up in England I was always fascinated by the similarities between Pele and David Beckham. The Brazilian had been immortalised to me as the man who had almost scored from the halfway line in the 1970 World Cup, but Beckham…well…he actually achieved it.

On Saturday night – injuries permitting – he will find himself stepping out into the great man’s shoes once again when he plays his first game for his new US club, LA Galaxy. The question now is, can he finally step out of his shadow and succeed where Pele could not? Can Beckham lift football to a position of permanent prominence in America?

One thing is for certain, the man who captained his country 58 times and single-handedly led them to the quarter finals of the last World Cup will be sorely missed. I checked in at home – the week before Beckham was due to be unveiled by the Galaxy it rained so much in England that half the country flooded – even the sky was crying!

Hi, my name is Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore. I’ll be blogging about topics in a variety of Internet industries.

I found it ironic last week when I read the headline in Monday’s New York Times, “Young Adults are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice,” because there I was, a young adult, reading this newspaper article. Well, sort of. I actually caught the article online, so maybe it was technically true that I was giving the newspaper scant notice.

I guess the real question for me was: “Are young people not reading the news at all?” That is a more frightening proposition, of course, if young people today are simply not getting informed on the issues of the day (Paris Hilton news notwithstanding). Like many young adults today, I get my news primarily online. The Internet allows me to choose multiple sources, get varying points of view, and consume large quantities of news in short periods of time. So I decided to test the premise that young people weren’t getting their news at all by analyzing some comScore data. I compared young people’s Internet news consumption habits with other age groups, and this is what I found:

As you can see, nearly the same percentage of 18-34 year olds (59%) are reading news online each month as 35-54 year olds (61%). Not only that, but they are also going online to get their news nearly as many times each month (12 visits) as 35-54 year olds (13 visits).

So it’s not that young adults aren’t reading the news, they’re just doing it online instead of in newspapers. Maybe they prefer the Internet because it provides a quicker, easier and more comprehensive news experience. Or maybe, like me, they just don’t like to get ink on their fingers.