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.
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.
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.
Seems like a fairly light penalty for manipulating the markets, especially not having the accept responsibility for the charges.
I just checked their stock...it's dropped almost 90% in a year. All signs show this company is spiraling toward bankruptcy.
They refer civil cases to the DOJ for parallel criminal prosecution.