Waiting for b.scorecardresearch.com...

[John]

Is there any chance Ning will remove b.scorecardresearch.com from our networks?

When it takes a long time to finish loading the user spends precious time looking at her mouse pointer instead of the content.

[Eric Suesz]

Funny how the Ning people here haven't said a word since this post has been up. 

I always hear this, as if it is a conspiracy of some sort when we don't weigh in on any particular discussion. No conspiracy. If you think there's something wrong or broken or making your site run slow, shoot our support team a message and they'll look into it. 

[Writer Chick {Diane}]

Helpful article. I just "Opted Out" with all of my browsers. Now we'll see if they're true to their word. 

[LadyHawk]

Well, I'm guessing it was put there because they are ready to start running the Glam ads.

From Abine -

What is scorecardresearch.com?

scorecardresearch.com is a domain used by Comscore Beacon which is an analytics company that is part of a network of sites, cookies, and other technologies used to track you, what you do and what you click on, as you go from site to site, surfing the Web. Over time, sites like scorecardresearch.com can help make an online profile of you usually including the sites you visit, your searches, purchases, and other behavior. Your profile can then be exchanged and sold between various companies like scorecardresearch.com as well as being sold to other advertisers and marketers.

[SweetPotato]

I think that if we choose not to run glam ads then they should remove it. This whole glam/Ning ad thing is starting to stink. Cookies on our sites so glam can monitor our sites, not allowed to run our own ads on mobile. It's worrying for the future as we slowly lose control.
SP

[John]

b.scorecardresearch.com has been in our sites since at least 2009.

http://creators.ning.com/forum/topic/search?q=scorecardresearch

We only notice it when the b.scorecardresearch.com servers get slow and make us wait for pages to finish loading.

[Aaron]

Hey John,

That's correct—this comScore code has been in place for some time on Ning and is an external service that monitors traffic patterns. As we note in this discussion, there isn't any personally identifiable information transmitted via this beacon.

Best,
Aaron

[John]

Back to my original question, will Ning always use comScore?

There's already two instances of Google Analytics (mine and yours) in our pages.

[Aaron]

John,

The comScore beacon is an industry-standard way of measuring website audience reach and traffic. Earlier this year, we made some changes so that networks with mapped domains can choose to opt out of this reporting so that traffic on their networks isn't rolled up into our overall traffic. Opting out won't remove the comScore beacon from your network, but rather will assign traffic to your mapped domain instead of the overall Ning/Glam Media traffic rollup. 

I've also contacted our engineering team to see what we can do on our end to ensure the calls to scorecardresearch.com load quickly. I'll let you know about any updates from our end.

—Aaron

[John]

That answers my question.  Thanks Aaron.

[John]

Industry-Standard or not, that "waiting on b.scorecardresearch.com" is a hot mess right now.

[Eric Suesz]

I don't know about a hot mess, but we're going to check it out more closely. Maybe the elements of your page can load in a better way to help with this. Our engineers want to check it out. 

[John]

You know I appreciate that.

Google ranks sites in large part on page load completion time.