Quantcast is a Viable Alternative to Alexa

In a Long Tail world the way we measure the health of a Web site is broken. For starters, thousands of sites that are powered by Ajax are being undercounted, according to BusinessWeek. Second, comScore, Nielsen and Hitwise have done nothing to reach out to the little guy to give us the tools we need to participate in their auditing process. Finally, while Alexa provides interesting data and eye candy, it's not really very accurate. It measures only a small subset of more tech-savvy users.

Now there's a new entry in this horse race - Quantcast, which calls itself an "open Internet ratings service." Quantcast is run by a team of web analytics experts that want to create a clearinghouse of data for advertisers. Even better, they have a free Quantified Publisher Program that anyone can sign up for.

For each site, Quantcast creates an index indicator that states how that site stacks up against the broader US internet population. The tool works best for sites that have signed up for the Quantified Publisher Program, so data on blogs and smaller sites right now is sparse. However, for mainstream sites (be they 1.0 or 2.0), the data is very rich. For example...

* Data on digg shows that its audience is 69% male

* Most YouTube visitors are passers by as opposed to addicts

* Facebook visitors, on the other hand are addicts

Quantcast has a lot going for it and, unlike others, is poised to capitalize on the network effect if we all sign up for it. Give it a go.

Comments

[Rajan Sodhi]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to take a look at it. We use Site Catalyst to measure and monitor our own sites. I use Alexa with a grain of salt in terms of comparing our sites to the rest of the activity on the net. But, I never really feel I can trust the Alexa numbers.

[yaph]

Yeah thanks for the suggestion I am using Alexa and Google analytics and also Awstats. Think I’ll try this as a complement.

[Bob McPeak]

Steve, this is cool but what can you say about the accuracy of the indexes? I'm not an analytics expert but I'm guessing that Quantcast is taking ip addresses and somehow running them against ISP account databases in order to glean demographics like age, income, etc. If that's the case then wouldn't the results be skewed, especially when tracking usage of kids at home (parent's ISP account) or folks at work (business ISP account), etc.

Is there something fundamental about how this thing works that I don't understand?

By the way, I dropped Google Analytics onto several of my sites recently and I'm having a helluva good time with it. Especially the site overlays and defined funnel navigation analysis.

Keep up the good blogging!

Cheers,

Bob

[Dion Almaer]

It definitely needs help from the people.

I tried a couple of domains and the numbers were just a touch off, they were totally out of the ballpark.

E.g. my own tiny little blog had the same uniques as ajaxian.com (when there is a magnitude difference).

Also, how many people care about male vs. female? This looks great to give to an ad company (looks like TV data: "I have X% of 18-34 yr old males making > 100k", but some of us aren't using that data.

Good stuff though, and I hope it grows from here.

Cheers,

Dion

[Serge Lescouarnec]

Steve

I signed up and will give them a try for my blog 'Serge the Concierge'.
I also signed up for 'Performancing' Ad Network.
I guess we are all learning and seeing what sticks.

Have a good day

Serge
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com

[Depa]

I will trackback your post, which is very interesting. Unfortunately, my blog is in Italian, so I will post something here.
Just some notes:
- Quantcast seems to give a lot of information, but I agree with Bob McPeak: most of the outputs seem to be of a little accuracy
- If you search info about italian sites, even the most visited ones, it's a pain. Of course, it's because it depends only upon US visitors, but it becomes useless outside US
- The output they give will be very difficult to reach on Italy visitors, because it contains data which is protected by italian privacy law: you have to obtain explicit permission to use similar infos
- Alexa is not totally accurate, but I never found a site with infos better then theirs. Ok, you correctly noticed that the minor sites are not present, but... on Quantcast - and others -are not present some big sites! Alexa is good, in my opinion, when giving percentage infos or when making comparisons (maybe not so much when counting the number of page views...).

yaph, in the second comment, says that he is using Awstats and Rajan Sodhi, in the first one, says they are usiung Site Catalyst. Obviously, there is a big difference: you can use these tools because you have complete control on your site, while you cannot use them to watch other sites. The difference is important: if someone wants the real numbers, there is no other option than looking into their own logs; if you want advertising and positioning info, you have to use another tool and Alexa performs well, keeping in mind that you can obtain a lot of info for free.
It is important to have several tools to compare results (so, thanks again for your post), because none is perfect, but when we talk about the quality of the results - I'm not speaking about your post, but about what I read in several places - we have to keep in mind that we have to pay attention and understand what is behind those numbers.