NP. Actually, I think you raise the most salient point - the ultimate arbiter of Truth is “He who sells/serves the inventory”. Granted, as you point out, their numbers will be under reality because of the class 1 nature of the inventory. However, they are in the best position. So here’s a thought - if AMP gains substantial market share well beyond the current slate of partners (and maintains the exclusivity arrangements around ad serving with their partners - _key_), Yahoo will be in a prime position to become the arbiter of Truth for a significant segment of the market.

Actually I was wrong. I read 30M as 40M. It’s actually 30M, and it was posted publicly on Monday. (After this post was written, so no fault of yours.) TechCrunch should have gone to the advertising source (Federated Media) and seen that their numbers were off. FM has Ars listed at 19M pageviews per month, and their traffic has been public info ever since Ars moved to FM for its advertising platform a while back.

http://www.federatedmedia.net/authors/arstechnica

That link will disappear, so I made a screenshot linked in my blog post. My 30M number comes from the official post about the acquisition written by Ken and posted this Monday.

So yes, the Comscore numbers are way off, and more accurate numbers are, and have been, freely available, if you know where to look. FM’s numbers for Ars will always be lower than reality simply because they have to be. If someone wants to buy 30M pageviews, you darn well better be able to deliver that many pageviews, otherwise your advertising credibility takes a serious hit.

Take care,

Thanks for your note and blog entry. You assert privately collected data as fact - something with which I fundamentally have an issue. That being said, I did make reference to the 4.5 million “claimed” unique number at the end of my original post. Though, again, that’s a privately collected number (along with the 40 million pageviews you cite). While everyone concedes that Alexa and Comscore undercount, that quite a miss - 1.5 million vs. 4.5 million uniques. That’s nothing compared to the more easily audited 4 million pageviews vs. 40 million that you also cite. Ten fold. Ouch. That sort of delta stretches logic and credibility. Whether that is in Comscore or in the private Ars Technicia data is for you to decide…. As for the 5 million “readers” comment (again, private data) - I won’t go there. I’m not going to speculate what Ars considers a “reader” vs. a monthly unique.

All that being said - all of this conjecture around Comscore vs. private data is really a moot point. Conde Nast evidently saw value there. Let’s see if they capitalize on it and where future acquisitions fall in valuation.

Ars is getting ~40M pageviews per month with 5M readers.

It’s about $38 to buy 1000 pageviews on the site going by the old Federated Media numbers.

You do the math.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080519-ars-technica-acquired-by-conde-nast-the-low-down.html