
Facebook's iOS Bug Led ComScore to Overestimate Time Spent - prostoalex
http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-s-ios-bug-led-comscore-overestimate-time-spent/302522/
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kolbe
Zuckerberg must be learning from Volkswagen. I love to see cross-industry
collaboration.

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nthitz
"asked digital measurement firm ComScore -- which uses calls made by
Facebook's apps as a proxy for time spent"

How does ComScore go about measuring this? Do they run background processes on
devices that can detect network calls by other applications? Do they detect
the traffic elsewhere in the network? Both of those seem unlikely, so I'm
confused.

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Kallikrates
ComScore is one of the larger providers of these statistics similar to Nielsen
ratings they provide a library you setup in your app.

see # 18: [https://medium.com/ios-os-x-development/libraries-used-in-
th...](https://medium.com/ios-os-x-development/libraries-used-in-the-
top-100-ios-apps-5b845ad927b7#.60hwtj4wo)

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bosky101
there is no way fb let alone any self respecting app would do a cost-benefit
analysis of added app size, security and scrutiny - and decide to embed an sdk
just to make some marketers happy. i wouldn't be surprised if they made api
calls with an extremely high sampling considering 1.5B people use the fb app.

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akshayB
Facebook used this number and mentioned on it during the earnings call,
showing how their business is growing and people are spending more and more
time using their app and website. Does this have any implications (if they
knew the bug was already there) that they publish wrong and inaccurate
information to mislead investors.

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mig39
"bug"

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kolbe
Sounds like a nifty feature to me.

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loceng
Aren't there measurement rules that are meant to be followed to allow
differentiation between active and passive calls?

I could see smaller apps not correctly following rules if they exist, however
you'd hope that someone like ComScore would be making sure the top of their
data is accurate.

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AznHisoka
Comscore is one of the best marketers in the industry. They've led everyone to
believe their data is accurate and reliable when in actuality it's 99.9%
unreliable estimates and extrapolation.

