What is Comscore?

Updated April 2024

If you’re part of the Mediavine community, you may have heard us refer to Comscore at some point in the past. But what is Comscore? And why should you care as a publisher?

Comscore describes itself on its website as a powerful third-party source for “accurately measuring audiences in an increasingly cross-platform world.”

Its mission is to “quantify the resulting behaviors, and understand the performance of specific investments, against unique branding objectives.”

Comscore helps marketers, advertisers and brands connect with their most relevant consumers by accurately measuring the audience size and quality of media companies.

In other words, advertisers use Comscore to find the best audiences.

Because of its reputation for verifying advertising quantity and quality online (and TV and beyond), advertisers use Comscore rankings as one metric when allocating their budgets.

This stamp of approval is why Comscore matters.

Properties verified in Comscore’s rankings have been thoroughly vetted and represent the target audiences and brand-safe domains that premium brands are looking for.

Mediavine’s Comscore is Your Comscore

As of this post, Mediavine has more than 10,000 sites under its exclusive umbrella. All of that traffic, aggregated into one portfolio, makes up Mediavine’s Comscore ranking.

These websites reach millions of U.S. adults across desktop and mobile devices each month, and Mediavine consistently ranks in the top 20 Comscore properties across several major categories, like travel and food.

Comscore tracks more than 100 different website categories, and while we work with content creators who have more website specializations than we can list here, our publishers predominantly fit into five of them, all within lifestyle niches.

One of the Mediavine requirements during our application process is for websites to sign a Traffic Assignment Letter (TAL) allowing us to assign their traffic to our overall Comscore.

You probably don’t give it a lot of thought, but by completing the Traffic Assignment Letter, you allow your website to be a part of the conversation at the highest levels of the advertising world.

With that TAL in hand, we assign sites to relevant categories, such as Mediavine Home, Mediavine Travel or Mediavine Food, regularly the third-largest “food entity” on the web.

In 2019, we began submitting websites for Comscore’s Parenting, Travel, Finance and Home & DIY categories, and our rankings now reflect those categories, too.

Every month, more players in the advertising ecosystem continue to learn about and recognize Mediavine as a quality, trusted space to run ads and improve their business outcomes.

With advertisers exploring their options and weighing potential properties for their campaigns, we are in this together. Mediavine adding more sites to its portfolio benefits our publishers because Mediavine technology is built to scale, and external factors such as Comscore rankings further cement our bargaining power.