Polvi and I have been following the release of Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, for a couple reasons. First, it’s a fresh and great approach to open source marketing – open pricing! Second, their process has some flavors of our funnelcake project. For In Rainbows, they’re considering the path of fans as: visit -> download -> pay $0 or any amount -> listen.

The link above references a comScore study attempting to roughly measure the success of In Rainbows (via the number of downloads). The entrance of their funnel relies on an estimate of 1.2 million visitors to Radiohead’s web site, InRainbows.com, during the month of October. From the study’s numbers, one can then see what percent of visitors paid for their download and what average price those fans paid.

Radiohead has come out contesting comScore’s analysis. Radiohead and comScore can have their own disagreement over the middle of the funnel, i.e., download percentages and prices paid. Where Mozilla can perhaps shed some light on the situation is the entrance of the funnel, i.e., how many fans visited Radiohead’s site in October? All other analysis is completely dependent on this piece of the puzzle, so it’s critical that any discussion be certain that the answer to this question be 100% accurate.

So, how can Mozilla help?

For the month of September 2007, Mozilla saw 42.7 million unique visitors (this includes just our www.mozilla.com domain, which hosts about 50% of all Mozilla traffic).

What about comScore and Compete.com? How close did they come to estimating our traffic for September 2007?

• comScore’s study says 16.7 million unique visitors
• Compete shows our “people count” as 3.4 million

Perhaps Radiohead has a legitimate concern…