Comscore useless when measuring social Networks.

Compete.com  was kind enough to send me a breakdown of traffic to the major dating sites.   The following data shows just how useless comscore is when it comes to ranking dating sites.    Comscores ranking of dating and social networking sites is based purely on number of uniques.  

This data is for USA traffic only and clearly shows that number of uniques has little to do with a sites popularity.

Although True.com  had  over 9 million unique “visitors” last month vs 1 million for plentyoffish.com   True.com has only 30% more active members.

The first Graph….

• The area marked “sessions” could be interpreted as the number of times visitors  accessed the specified area of the sites within the month.
• The area marked “visitor” represents the number of people who accessed the specified area of the site.
• The area labeled “register” is a count of visitors (or sessions) who accessed the registration page at the respective site. Because of an issue with True.com’s domain structure, Signs acquired from Myspace.com are not shown.
• The area marked “logins” under sessions represents the total number of logins per month
• The area marked “members” under visitors represents the number of people who logged in during the past month.
• The totals area gives data on the total number of visitors and pages viewed for the entire site domain for the month.

The second graph.

• The “Members and Visitors” graph compares total number of site visitors vs. members for the month of September. I used the term “Active” members because there are probably members at all 3 sites who haven’t signed for during the month of September.
• The “Member to visitor ratio” graph compares the 3 sites on the basis of visitors vs active members. (Members divided by visitors)
• The member activity quotient is a comparison of how often members log into the services. Basically, this calculation is Number of sessions divided by number of members. To get a better approximation, I averaged this number across all 4 months of data.