Once again, smart people are screwing up audience measurement methods and are complaining that panel-based or survey-based numbers must be wrong because they don’t match their HitBox/SiteMeter/Whatever cookie/javascript based traffic tools. This is just silly. While the panel-based and survey-based reports aren’t perfect, either, their methodology is actually pretty sound. What’s worse, when you think about the numbers, they actually make sense even aside from the math. Fred Wilson points out most of the problems, so read that.

I’ve written about this before, so let me just summarize the two salient points here.

First, automated measurement tools, whether they be fancy, expensive, high end products like HitBox or free/trendy ones like SiteMeter, Google Analytics, or whatever will always, always, always overcount your total visitors. Always. These services can only really track browsers, not actual humans. I browse certain sites from at least 3 computers. Many people will surf from at least 2 (home, office).

Second, real humans are different from visits. Always remember, when you’re looking at your web site statistics, this is the rule of thumb: hits > page views > visits > actual visitors .

The third, tangential point is that Arrington is super silly when he claims that Comscore numbers are “flaky.” Those numbers form the basis of ad rates. If those numbers were truly flaky, which I read to mean wildly inconsistent, no one would use them for advertising rates. Literally billions of dollars are exchanged on the basis of Comscore and Nielsen numbers. Let’s not get carried away with our own self-importance, shall we? In this case, it’s unlikely he knows more than the entire market.