From the NY Times:

Forbes' Web prowess is a reason Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that has U2's Bono as a managing director, agreed on Aug. 4 to buy a minority stake in Forbes' publishing business. But a closer look at the numbers raises questions about Forbes.com's success. For its claim of a worldwide audience of nearly 15.3 million, it has been citing February data from comScore Media Metrix, one of the two leading providers of third-party Web traffic data.

But comScore has since revised the figure downward to less than 13.2 million as part of a broader revamping of its worldwide data for many sites. There is also the question of where those visitors were going. According to comScore, 45 percent of Forbes.com's February traffic went to ForbesAutos.com, heavy on car reviews and photos. About three-quarters of the ForbesAutos.com traffic came from outside the United States.

Since February, comScore said, Forbes.com's traffic has tumbled. In July, Forbes Web sites drew 7.3 million unique visitors worldwide, almost a million of whom went to ForbesAutos ... Asked why, as recently as last week, Forbes.com continued to cite comScore's discarded figure of 15.3 million on its Web site, [Forbes.com's James] Spanfeller said that the company only learned of comScore's new, lower number when informed of it by a reporter...

What about comScore's July figure of 7.3 million, which is less than half what Forbes.com has been using? Spanfeller said comScore's latest figures clashed with the company's internally generated data, which still showed about 15 million visitors a month, with ForbesAutos.com accounting for 2 million of those. Still, Spanfeller, who is also chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade association for online media, conceded that the proliferation of Web traffic statistics could be confusing and agreed that the industry needed to deal with that issue.

We can sympathize with Spanfeller a bit; we've used three different tools to measure our traffic -- some simultaneously -- and they have never come back with the same data.

Still, Bono may wonder if he's found what he's looking for in Forbes.com. (Sorry. That was really bad.)