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By grouping Internet users into categories based on their amount of Web usage, comScore thinks it can help advertisers balance out their ad delivery.

ComScore Ready To Weigh Its Metrics

Time matters most under the revised system comScore plans to use to categorize Web surfers.

The Financial Times said comScore wants to help advertisers reach the broader Internet audience better. The smaller segment of active users sees a lot of ads, while advertisers miss the less active ones.

"The shape of the internet audience is a downward slope with a long tail of light users. If you’re just looking at the average figures, you are in danger of reaching the same heavy users over and over again," comScore executive VP Bob Ivins said in the report.

ComScore plans three time-based segments for breaking up the Internet audience: heavy, medium, and light. The 20 percent who do the most browsing fall into the heavy category, with the next 30 percent rated as medium. Everyone else goes into light.

The report cited the disparity between the average time people spend on a site, and how more active visitors can skew that figure:

For instance, according to ComScore’s analysis of US web traffic, heavy users on average spent almost 97 hours online during May.

The average time spent online among the light 50 per cent of the US web audience was just 3.6 hours.

But when this is reported as an average across all US web users, ComScore’s figure rises to 28.8 hours.