Compete.com, a Kantar Media company, today released its ranking of the top 250 websites for August 2011 (click here for the top 50).
We can’t repeat this often enough, but take these stats with a grain of salt when it comes to accuracy.
We’ve looked at the top 250 all the same, because the list tends to depict trends also visible with other analytics service providers, such as comScore and Google Trends. → Read More
Earlier today, I was checking out some new questions in the TechCrunch topic area on Quora. One in particular caught my eye: How was TechCrunch traffic affected by their major redesign in July 2011?
This has been something I’ve seen asked here and there given the radical changes we implemented — and, I assume, given the audience issues Gawker faced after their recent redesign. Mostly, people seem to want to know: is TechCrunch tanking?
I was set to weigh in, when I noticed that someone else already had. This person (not affiliated with TechCrunch) painted a picture in which our site was essentially crashing and burning since the redesign (the answer has since been removed by Quora, presumably due to down-voting). Their source? Compete. → Read More
When it comes to public-facing web analytics, basically, they all suck. We in the press are sometimes forced to use tools like Alexa and Compete for comparison’s sake, but using either for absolute numbers is extremely flawed and basically worthless. Naturally, those companies always disagree with us when we say such things. But a new bit of information may put that disagreement to the test.
The Compete chart for Compete.com is perfect. If the chart is to be believed, Compete is in a total tailspin. According to their data, they’ve dropped from about 750K unique visitors in January 2010 to roughly 250K in December 2010. The numbers for total visits are even worse (dropping from 3.25 million to about 750K). Both have been in decline every month since March. And neither shows signs of stopping. → Read More
A couple of weeks ago, comScore came out with a report that said Microsoft’s Bing had reached an all-time high market share of 11.8% in November 2010.
According to rival Compete, however, Bing’s market share is actually much larger than that. → Read More
Black Friday, or the day after Thanksgiving, has always been known as one of the year’s biggest holiday shopping days. But in the past five years, Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, has become a a serious shopping day for online sales and promotions. Last year, Cyber Monday brought in $887 million in sales compared to $595 million in online spending on Black Friday. Today, Compete is releasing a survey that indicates that once again consumers could be choosing Cyber Monday for shopping as opposed to Black Friday.
According to Compete’s data, 45% of respondents indicated they will do their holiday shopping on Cyber Monday, versus 37% who plan to shop on Black Friday. Interestingly, Black Friday shoppers are planning to spend more money than Cyber Monday shoppers, with Black Friday shoppers averaging an expected $353 and Cyber Monday shoppers averaging an expected $233. → Read More
Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).
Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). → Read More
A month ago, Jason Calacanis went on a rant about why everyone should boycott comScore. He felt they were using sketchy tactics to bully people into their pay-to-play model for measuring web analytics. He also noted that their free competitors like Quantcast, Google, and Compete would soon eat their lunch. Both Quantcast and Google (Analytics) offer direct counting of pageviews (but even these methods can be abused). But you may wonder how exactly Compete gets its numbers? It appears, that some sketchy tactics are (or at least were) employed, as well.
We were recently pointed to this post from last month by Ben Edelman, a Harvard privacy advocate. In it, he details the data the Upromise toolbar collects and sends out. This toolbar is used by college students looking for savings on various items across the web, and can be quite useful. But until a few weeks ago, it appears they were also sending web browsing (and more personal) data to Compete without anyone’s knowledge. Writes Edelman: → Read More
Jason Calacanis, our partner over the years on the TechCrunch50 conference, wrote quite a rant yesterday about analytics company Comscore. His argument: that Comscore has vastly undercounted traffic and visitors over the years, and is now formalizing “their extortion ring” by offering to track traffic more directly (and the numbers are generally much higher) via tracking pixels for a $10,000/year fee.
You can read the whole post over at Calacanis.com. He doesn’t pull any punches (in fact he goes on a tangent about punching bullies in the face as a kid) He suggests that companies refuse to pay Comscore for the service, and that investors short the stock.
Comscore investor Fred Wilson laid into Jason with a couple of comments on a copy of the post on Posterous. He also randomly dragged me into the argument (I think he’s still mad about the Zynga stuff): → Read More
London-based market research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) has acquired Compete for $75 million. Another $75 million in possible earn-outs through 2010 brings the total acquisition price up to $150 million. Publicly-traded comScore, by comparison, has market cap of $570 million. TNS will use the data culled from Compete’s panel of 2 million Web surfers to measure online purchasing behavior and the effectiveness of online ads. Compete started out as an Idealab company, and has raised about $43 million since 2000. Other investors include Charles River Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Partners, North Hill Ventures, Split Rock Partners, and William Blair Capital Partners. They were undoubtedly probably hoping for a better outcome, but a solid double is better than a strike out. (Update: Here’s the Compete blog post about the deal). Compete’s revenues in 2007 rose 50 percent to $15 million, but it lost $4.5 million. Compete offers Web traffic stats for free on its site Compete.com, and competes with Alexa, Quantcast, (both also free) and comScore (not free). According to Compete’s own stats, it attracts about the same number of U.S. visitors a month as Alexa (727,000 for Compete vs. 758,000 for Alexa), but Quantcast is the leader with more than double that (1.9 million uniques). CrunchBase Information Compete Quantcast Alexa comScore Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Web analytics startup Compete.com opened its API for public use today. Websites and applications can now access Compete’s data and incorporate it into their own products. This is timely for the company, which competes directly with Amazon’s Alexa. Recenty, Statsaholic has been in a very public dispute with Alexa over use of its data, with both sides looking bad. That dispute recently went to litigation. As some services shy away from Alexa, either due to public perception or inflexibility over the Alexa APIs, Compete could grab additional market share. Compete is using Mashery to handle the logistics and distribution of its API. We wrote about Mashery when they launched late last year. Our previous coverage of Compete is here. → Read More
All web analytics track your activity somewhere along pipeline connecting your computer to a website’s server. Comscore tracks traffic trends on computers of 2 million users. Hitwise catches traffic at the ISP level and matches it up with demographic data they collected. Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa differ from these other web metrics companies by tracking traffic on the computers of users who installed their tool bars. Each of these services gauge critical marketing metrics such as unique visitors and page views. However, some people argue that the page view is no longer a proper measure of a website’s heft. New web page design principles such as Flash and AJAX are making constant page requests obsolete. One of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon is Justin.TV where you can log on and never refresh the page. This is great news for web users, but it’s sowing confusion among advertisers over how to peg a site’s true advertising appeal. Comscore, who’s currently looking to go public, has been evolving their metrics to keep up with the changes. They recently announced their “visit” metric after facing some heat by BusinessWeek over ranking MySpace above Yahoo’s in monthly page views last November. The visit metric was meant to gauge user engagement by counting the number of unique requests for a site at least a half hour from the last request. All those pesky MySpace page requests would be lumped into one visit, giving a fairer idea of how often each unique user was engaging with a website each month. It had the result they wanted, bumping Yahoo back on top. Compete also has a visit metric. But today they also launched a new metric called “attention,” which argue see as a better measure of user engagement. Attention is the total amount of time U.S. users spend on a website as a percentage of total time spent on the Internet by all U.S. users. It’s analogous to Alexa’s reach metric, which tracks the number of visitors to a site as a percentage of total internet users. Compete’s attention metric is like airtime, whereas Alexa’s reach is more like audience size. According to Compete, we spend about 1% of our internet time on YouTube. Compete also tracks the change in attention over time, called velocity, unique visitors per month, site visits, page views per visit, and average stay. → Read More
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