Qihoo 360 Rejects Allegations From Anonymous Analytics

Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd.

today issued a statement refuting allegations from Anonymous Analytics. In addition to the false allegations that Qihoo 360 has previously addressed, the report issued on July 2, 2012 by Anonymous Analytics, alleges that data provided by a comScore from February through April 2012 "proves definitively that Qihoo has been lying to investors about its traffic volume." Qihoo 360 strongly rejects this and all other allegations in the report. 1) The hao.360.cn and www.hao123.com traffic data quoted in the article is inaccurate and misleading. The data was derived from "panel method" and rely on sampling information only. The accuracy of such method highly depends on the sample size and distribution. Sampling data has many limitations and biases. comScore's panel was rarely installed among Chinese Internet users in the past because it ran into conflict with most Internet security solutions in China. As such the panels tended to have a disproportionally small installation base among hao.360.cn users because substantially all of such users use 360 security solutions. 2) The sampling method significantly undercounting Qihoo 360's traffic data. Qihoo 360 and comScore have been working together over the past few months to improve the penetration rate of comScore's panel among security product users, mainly by making the panel more user-friendly. Over the course of last few months, comScore has offered several revised versions of the panel software to accommodate such changes. While comScore has made meaningful progress, the panel's sample distribution is still highly biased. 3) Qihoo 360 voluntarily added comScore tag to its websites to help comScore adjust and improve its statistic model on panel data. In recent months, the tag data has shown similar traffic volume and trends compared to the Company's internal tracking and other third party sources. During this period, an European third-party anti-virus software mistakenly identified the tag as a Trojan and we temporarily remove the tag from hao.360.cn to ensure user experience till the issue was resolved. 4) A spokesperson for comScore commented "comScore have been working and is still working with Qihoo 360 and other publishers in China for Unified Digital Measurement (UDM). At this point, comScore has not released any UDM data for Qihoo Sites. We do not comment on publisher's unpublished data or any work in progress"