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Economic Predictions Using Web Usage Data

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it's-the-super-nielsen-ratings dept.

Makarand writes "The Chicago Tribune has an article on the claims of ComScore Networks Inc., that it can predict major economic trends by tracking the online activity of 1.5 Million people. The company gains access to people's Internet travelogues by giving them free security software and programs that speed up their connections. Economists say that the company's models need to be tested over several years before they can be considered accurate."

4 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Income-bracket/age-range skewed? by mccalli · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I would imagine this data is skewed towards the mid and high-end income brackets, and also away from the older age brackets.

    Given that the equipment you need to access the web is still fairly pricy, and also that the majority of people accessing it are still relatively young, I'd question the ability of this model to extrapolate to the wider world.

    Cheers,
    Ian

    1. Re:Income-bracket/age-range skewed? by actiondan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would imagine this data is skewed towards the mid and high-end income brackets, and also away from the older age brackets.

      Also, the sample will only include people stupid enough to download their spyware and let it report back on everything they do online.

  2. What About Credit/Debit Card Co's Right Now by jck2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does anyone know what Amex, Discover, Visa, MasterCard, etc. are doing currently with the data they accumulate? I am not suggesting anything nefarious, rather I think these institutions, by having much larger (and probably more representative) sample sizes, would be able to accomplish much more than this smaller company would.

  3. Re:Registration required Complimentry copy below by mr_z_beeblebrox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My own thought on this (my fiance is a biologist and we do a lot of 'those' stats, that is my only qualification) is that internet users are a subset of the people who make up the economy. As more research goes into this they will find that trends indicated by internet usage will have a relationship with actual trends of the 'whole picture' and will later develop the internet /society ratio as a valid indicator. However, until they have this backlog of data to compare it to it will not remain valid.

    They could of course mine the net for data on past years and produce 'predictions' for those years to compare with actual data on those years and deduce the ratio from there.