comScore acquires Nedstat

Headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Nedstat aims to offer world-class technology that helps organisations optimise customer experiences and maximise the return on digital media investments. With the Nedstat technology installed on thousands of sites, the acquisition helps comScore accelerate its global expansion strategy, particularly in European markets, and strengthens comScore's Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) platform, which combines panel-based audience measurement with census-level data collection to provide a holistic view of digital consumer behaviour.

"The acquisition of Nedstat is another important step towards fulfilling our vision of making the Unified Digital Measurement platform the global standard for digital measurement," said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore president and CEO. "In addition, our clients are asking for a new class of business applications to maximise the monetisation of their audiences using the UDM data we already collect. The Nedstat platform helps us deliver substantial additional value to clients, expand existing customer relationships, and broaden the scope of our addressable market by adding new and unique digital business analytics to comScore's offerings.

Nedstat clients have benefited over the years from the platform's detailed and flexible analytical tools and elegant user-experience. We are committed to using Nedstat's technology to develop new applications, greater scalability, a more expansive data set, and a unified and consistent view of audience statistics, all of which we think will help generate actionable insights that can lead to improved business results for customers."

'A compelling vision'

"We believe that Nedstat web analytics can add substantial value for clients when combined with the existing comScore measurement platform," said Michael Kinsbergen, CEO of Nedstat. "comScore's 'Unified Digital Measurement' platform presents a compelling vision of the future of digital measurement, and we are eager to play a vital role in helping to make that vision a reality. "

Upon the acquisition, Nedstat became a wholly owned subsidiary of comScore. Kinsbergen will be helping in the transition and will continue to be involved by joining comScore's advisory board. In addition, Fred Appelman, Nedstat's chief technology officer, and Michiel Berger, Nedstat's co-founder and chief innovations officer, will join comScore in senior strategy and technology roles.

comScore believes that the Nedstat acquisition will contribute approximately US$4 million (about R28.8 million) of additional revenue for the remainder of 2010. comScore anticipates that due to transaction-related expenses and transaction-related accounting adjustments the transaction will be dilutive to 2010 GAAP and non-GAAP net income, but accretive to quarterly GAAP and non-GAAP net income within the first half of 2011.

Clients voice support

"With today's fast paced and complex digital media landscape, it is crucial for an International media group like Eurosport to have a global source of digital market intelligence providing analytics, audience measurement, insight into consumer behaviour and socio-demographic characteristics on Internet, online video, mobile and tablet usage. Joining Nedstat's analytic solution with comScore's Unified Digital Measurement platform is a very positive development. The benefit for Eurosport of having one single service provider will be twofold: we will have all the information we need about consumer behaviour on our digital platforms and at the same time the analytics needed to optimise the performance of our clients' advertising campaigns," said Pierre-Emmanuel Ferrand, head of programmes marketing and research, Eurosport.

"Sound data and analytics are the lifeblood of any digital business and we support any efforts in our industry to bring the various data sets into greater harmony. This will enable us to have greater confidence in the data and make better business decisions in a more timely and efficient manner," says Roberto Massiff, VP of sales, Grupo El Mercurio.