A stream initiation may not have actually occured for any number of reasons (server problems, problems with the user’s computer such as an incompatible flash version etc etc).

It’s a very rough estimate in other words…

There are serious problems with most of the panel-based traffic measurement services, particularly with the ones most frequently cited by reporters (ComScore and Nielsen NetRatings). This is largely a function of their panel-based metholodogy, but as it turns out Alexa is in many cases substantially worse because its data is collected only from users who have installed its toolbar. Quantcast is a great idea and could have some potential if they can get people to tag their sites with their javascripts.

I work for a large television network with an web presence, and we would almost never use traffic numbers from Alexa, NetRatings NetView, or ComScore to inform our business strategy. They’re more for initiating conversations with advertisers or for PR, since the data is supplied by a third party. Very frequently, even with large sites, these guys are way off in terms of direction.

They’re already out there on bittorrent and the p2p network of your choice. And the people making big bucks from them are the torrent indexing sites from which people download them.

Alexa actually shows a drop for both sites and Compete do show a bump for abc but a drop for cbs. Quantcast give show a big drop for CBS and some big ups and downs for ABC.

I guess it depends who you trust for ratings…