Comscore = con-score

This weekend ornery web entrepreneur and visionary Jason Calacanis blasted Comscore, the web analytics firm, calling for a boycott of its data and products.

Jason says he hates Comscore not only because its data is fundamentally wrong, but because the company asks web publishers to pay to “correct” its data.

According to these folks it was an unspoken truth for years that if you paid Comscore they fixed your numbers, and if you were a small company and didn’t, well, you suffered. Comscore would probably deny this, but their recent “pay to play” product shows their true stripes.

For the record, my colleagues and I have always found Comscore’s data to be hilariously inaccurate. As I recall, for a long while Comscore showed PerezHilton.com to have a predominantly male readership, even when our multiple different surveys and data-sources showed his readers to be 88-90% women.

I don’t know what Comscore’s data shows today, because frankly, I gave up caring about Comscore years ago. But if Jason wants to rumble with them, I’ll give a damn again.

As Jason says, Quantcast and Google do a much better job.

Here are some old links that speak to both Comscore’s power and inaccuracies: Hulu miscount; IAB calls for auditing ; Comscore kills Canadian site.

(For the record, while I’ve considered shorting Comscore’s stock in the past, I’m going to take no position while I’m complaining about their services.)