A select few internet outfits are so good at puffing up their numbers for advertisers that they transcend the sketchy, and deserve admiration for their cunning. We've already covered the tricks of companies such as Heavy.com and Glam Media. But I've heard, over the grapevine, about a much more devious operator.

One VP of marketing at a New York internet media company says they buy traffic from those sites that "index" especially highly in Comscore, the service most advertisers use to judge the popularity of internet sites. The assumption: that those internet users are more likely to be represented on the audience measurement outfit's panel. And every new panel member that visits adds more than a thousand to Comscore's estimate of the devious marketer's monthly audience.

There's a logical next step. Comscore gets its panel members to download tracking software, sometimes by bundling the click spying software in with popular apps such as download accelerators. So an idea: develop another free app, a lightweight news reader, for instance, with a publisher's own content as the default, promoting links back to the main web site. And piggyback it on the same apps that carry Comscore's click-monitoring bug. Or, even simpler, push one's own existing readers to download the host app. Now that would be an efficient way to goose audience numbers, and get the attention of advertising buyers.

By the way, after yesterday's item on Comscore's discrimination against geeky sites, the firm's CTO jumped into the discussion. Gregory Dale says the firm samples more Firefox users a little more fully than we thought, at least at home. That, and other points, here.

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