Overjoyed investors have made Google’s stock go up by about 20 percent since the company reported its earnings. comScore, on the other hand, temporarily lost eight or so percent of its value.
The research company had predicted that Google would achieve a pathetic two percent year-over-year increase in search click volume. Google came back with 20, and that’s when onlookers got a little bit upset.
comScore Stock
There is, after all, a pretty big gap between two and 20; if these were dollars, and not clicks, a two percent rise would be lucky to keep up with inflation, while 20 would represent a reasonable two-year gain.
comScore might not have screwed up as much as it appears, though. Henry Blodget writes, “The majority of Google’s click growth in the quarter likely came in the international business. Paid clicks in the US business likely grew only in the high single digits (less than half of the 20% reported growth). So, after accounting for the international contribution, Comscore’s US reports were likely actually relatively close to being accurate.”
Also, “Comscore alerted analysts to a surprising deceleration in the US, one that was borne out in the Q1 results. If analysts had dismissed the Comscore data out of hand and refused to cut their estimates, they’d be nursing some major wounds this morning.”
Blodget’s lines of thought may be winning converts; at the moment, comScore‘s down only 0.81 percent for the day.
