The announcement was made at the Techcrunch Disrupt Conference in New York. ComScore has not said why it decided to waive the $5,000 fee, though it has been criticised for levying the charge, with some raising concerns that it would create a two-tier system where paying customers would have their websites measured differently to non-paying customers.

ComScore CMO Linda Abraham previously defended the charge as “very reasonable” as it included six months of reporting, and charging for access to the reporting system “is the only revenue source we have to cover our costs”.

But the price point was too high for many small publishers, making the free measurement services offered by the likes of Quantcast and Compete more appealing.

The fee waiver, along with a new ‘Start-Up, Step-Up’ programme that provides free tagging and free access to basic reporting metrics for sites with less than one million unique visitors, is likely to put ComScore back in contention among smaller players looking for a web measurement service.

Abraham said in a blog post yesterday: “We believe that opening our platform and providing additional benefits to the start-up community will go a long way towards helping those in our industry fully demonstrate their value to advertisers and investors.”