[casual_games] Portal Traffic

[Alex St. John]

Nobody really seems to be able to count traffic out there.  Comscore just reported that we're the 5th largest game network with over 7m uniques, but our internal data shows a number over 10m.  There are several reasons they can't count casual gaming sites well.  A major one for us is that we try to get gamers off the site and into our game console or the games as quickly as possible where we can monetize them much more effeciently.  Comscore refuses to recognize all the in-game and in-console web traffic as "web traffic"  for no apparent rational reason.  If you look at Alexa you tend to find sites that carry a lot of free flash games more accurately reported because more of the audience is playing in the browser where Alexa can count them, but once they're in a downloaded game or a web based interface outside the browser both Alexa and Comscore lose count.
    
   
  RealArcade will almost certainly have the same condition we do, most of their audience is probably lost to measurement because they play from the RealArcade console. 
   
  There's a new free audience tracking site out there at snapshot.compete.com that is pretty interesting.  It probably suffers from the same measurement limitations as Alexa, but they don't try to hide the actual audience number as Alexa does.  
   
  -Alex 

 
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