BrightRoll Blog

By Tod Sacerdoti

October 5, 2009

I was recently on a panel discussing online video advertising, and a fellow panelist proclaimed “reach is not a problem for us, as we reach 115 million people according to comScore.”  This statement is factually incorrect.

To accurately reflect his company’s reach, the panelist should have said, “We can potentially reach 115 million people.” According to comScore’s methodology, in order reach those 115 million people, the network would have to buy every ad impression on every publisher they work with. Furthermore, only those publishers with more than 2% reach are verified to have an actual business relationship with the network.

(full disclosure — comScore began measuring my company on both actual reach and potential in April, 2009)

As with most misleading metrics, potential reach was likely created to help sell something. ComScore wanted to sell large annual subscriptions to video ad networks and video ad networks wanted a big reach number to sell advertising and compete effectively against the large display ad networks. The metric has fundamentally served its purpose – all video networks are paying customers and many video networks’ actual reach is large enough to compete with the large display networks — and as such, it is time to put this metric to rest.

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