
SEC Charges Comscore Inc. and Former CEO with Accounting and Disclosure Fraud - danso
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2019-186
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alecb
As someone who's been in the digital publishing space for a while, it still
confounds me that they became the industry standard. Their technology just did
not work in any capacity and it was widely known that their metrics were
completely manipulated depending on whether or not publishers ponied up the 5
to 6 digit ransom that ComScore asked for every month.

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52-6F-62
Yep. Watching the editorial teams' Slack channel at work is pretty
entertaining right now. "Schadenfreude" has come up at least once. If I could
peer into marketing it might be a sadder scene.

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abolishme
They're stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they provide the
'objective' benchmark for the entire media industry. On the other, they have
no way to actually capture the value of the data they provide, because
advertisers use their data to make decisions on opaque Big Tech platforms.
It's a commodity that doesn't have an equivalent exchange representation. On
the surface, it might seem like a bad faith data broker. But on a deeper
level, this is a canary in the programmatic ad monopoly coal mine. If we can
regulate data exchange, but can't regulate data use ... we're setting a
dangerous precedent.

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ajiang
Seems like a fairly light penalty for manipulating the markets, especially not
having the accept responsibility for the charges.

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tempsy
I just checked their stock...it's dropped almost 90% in a year. All signs show
this company is spiraling toward bankruptcy.

