What is the ICO Media Score?

The ICO Media Score is a way for ICO to represent and rank a media’s profile, influence and popularity compared to other websites by giving each a score using our in-house developed algorithm.

Each website is given a score from 0.1 to 10, with 10 being the highest and denoting a particularly influential media outlet with a big and engaged readership.

What does the ICO Media Score show me?

It gives you a clear, at-a-glance indication of whether you are being covered by the big sites, the medium sized sites or the smaller blogs across the territories that you’re working in. However, the ICO Media Score doesn’t give you a head count for the audience size of a site. Neither does it doesn’t give you specific pager impressions or unique users (although that data is used in the background to calculate the final score).

As the score is calculated the same across all countries, it is a good way to immediately compare a website across multiple different countries. So a site with a ICO Media Score of 5 will be roughly the same size, and will have roughly the same PR worth and awareness value, whether it’s a 5 in France, a 5 in Germany or a 5 in Italy.

What purpose does the ICO Media Score have?

The ICO Media score is especially useful when comparing one website with another. This makes it easy to not only track the number of articles published over time but also the potential importance and readerships those articles reached.

How is the ICO Media Score calculated?

The ICO Media Score is based on Alexa traffic rank of a website – a measure of how a website’s traffic is doing relative to all other sites on the web.

ICO uses the Alexa ranking for each media, but assigns a representative ranking to it: the ICO Media Score.

This ranking scores on a scale from 1 to 10, with steps of 1. In addition to this ranking, there is an additional category of 0.1 which denotes very small websites such as blogs or fansites. This category is the lowest rank and the highest possible score is 10.