More on the Radiohead Traffic Numbers

It appears that Radiohead is not happy with comScore's report last week that pegged the price paid by downloaders of its upcoming album, In Rainbows, at $6.

Via MTV last Thursday:

In the statement, Radiohead said the comScore data was "wholly inaccurate" and that it "in no way reflected definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project." To date, neither Radiohead nor their U.S. publicist, Steve Martin, have agreed to discuss any of the financial aspects of the download scheme, including how many copies were sold or how much fans paid on average.
Denying that the average non-freeloader fan paid only $6 for the download, as suggested by comScore's report, the group's representatives also stressed in the statement that "as the album could only be downloaded from the band's Web site, it is impossible for outside organizations to have accurate figures on sales."

Well, according to comScore, more than 2 million people "have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing."

But while Radiohead's contention is that comScore couldn't have tracked purchases on InRainbows.com, what about the 1.2 million figure the company reported for the number of visitors to the band's site in October?

To get a sense of this figure's accuracy, I also checked the traffic for InRainbows.com at comScore's competitor Compete.com which reports that 419,640 people in the U.S. visited the band's site in October:

(Go here for a comparison of Compete and comScore's methodologies.)

To see how this matched up w/ comScore's worldwide figures, I asked Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore, for the breakdown between U.S. and foreign traffic. He only had numbers for people who purchased, but assuming that the patterns are similar between those who just visited the site versus those who purchased In Rainbows, an extrapolated version of Compete's numbers actually come in below comScore's.

Lipsman said 59 percent of purchases were made by those in the U.S. and 41 percent by those living abroad. So on the assumption that Compete's 419,640 figure represents 59% of all traffic to InRainbows.com, that would mean global traffic could've been around 711,000 in October, much less than 1.2 million.

Playing with the numbers a bit more, the University of Minnesota estimates that roughly 20 percent of internet traffic comes from the United States. So, again using Compete's number, that would put total traffic for InRainbows.com at 2.1 million. The major problem with this figure is that it's unlikely people in Asia, which accounts for a significant chunk of web traffic, would be interested in Radiohead. Lipsman confirms this by saying that a large portion of international buyers came from western Europe. E.U. web traffic comprises 23 percent of all traffic, so a closer estimation could be around 1 million.

Tracking web traffic is decidedly a dark art with many ways to manipulate numbers, but Radiohead nor its representatives have disputed comScore's overall figure. So until the band, or some other intrepid web tracker, releases figures on how many people downloaded In Rainbows and how much they paid for it, we won't have a way to verify comScore's average price finding. Still, there is a chance that the total revenue figures I derived last week could be optimistic (and much less than this initial report that pegged sales at 1.2 million units).

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