Quantcast Adds Comparative Charting

Quantcast continues to get better and better. They are really going to give Alexa a run for their money. The methodology is stronger on Quantcast because they qualify publishers and they don't just rely on a silly toolbar. They work with advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks to get hard data on millions of Web sites.

The gang at Quantcast has added added a bunch of new goodies, including comparative charting, traffic trends and siteographics that tell you what similar sites people in their panel are visiting. I bet they're not only going to give Alexa trouble, but I also think that folks like Nielsen and comScore should be nervous. This is powerful stuff and I find I am tapping into their site almost on a daily basis.

Here's a screenshot from Quantcast showing some stats on Daily Kos...

Technorati Tags: Quantcast

Comments

[james]

Steve

It looks to me like Quantcast's model is to provide information that is wildly inaccurate in order to arm-twist people into signing up to "Quantify" their site.

[Konrad Feldman]

James,

Our strategy is to provide open internet ratings for everyone in the industry and to allow publishers to directly participate in the process. The reality is that panel based approaches in isolation (whether toolbar, ISP, etc.) often have wide margins or error for anything but the very largest sites. These methods were originally developed for Radio and TV, medium in which the range of media choices are tiny in comparison to the Internet. Fragmentation has stretched panel based approaches to breaking point, resulting in difficulty for publishers and advertisers alike in understanding and valuing Internet audiences. For Internet publishers to gain a share of advertising spend that is proportional to their share of media consumption, new measurement approaches are necessary.

We make all of our estimates publicly available and warn when these estimates are based on sparse data and may be less reliable. I did check your profile and noticed that this warning wasn't present - that was a bug in our latest release and has rectified.

The key point is that for the first time publishers can participate in the audience measurement and reporting process through our free Quantified Publisher program. The use of a measurement pixel leverages a key advantage the Internet has over other media - audiences can be directly measured. We also deliver control to publishers in selecting the information that best represents your unique audience.

We don't have all the answers, but we do have a talented team who are dedicated to improving the measurement of Internet audiences for the whole industry. We would love to hear your comments on what we can do to continue to improve the service.

Regards.

Konrad

[AdGuru]

Quantcast looks like it may have some promise - but I won't believe it until I see some proof in the pudding. Open ratings are great and all, but its not clear to me (and I have thought about it A LOT) how relying on measurement pixels is going to produce anything useful. Its like combining a crappy traffic counter like Hitbox with Comscore (this is the online measurement version of what rhea perlman and danny devito's kids might look like - spunky, but diminuitive). Maybe thats why the methodology on their site is written for a third-grader; I want more substance.

If anyone is giving Alexa and comScore a run for their money it's Compete.com at its SnapShot service. i have been using the site since it launched in November. Here is their post on the Compete Blog last week comparing its data and company history to Alexa.

http://blog.compete.com/2006/12/11/compete-vs-alexa-competitive-site-metrics/"

[Question 'Mark']

I'm surprise by the glowing review - these numbers are crazy. I will say it's pretty, but I'll stop there.

1) The visitor counts are completely obtuse. Get rid of the bar and give me a number. I put in ebay and I can't tell if it says 10M or 50M.

2) The numbers are simply wrong. CNN.com under 10M? comScore and Compete have CNN consistently over 15M. If QC is 50% off on large sites how bad is it for small sites?

3) The centralized site tagging / local reporting is interesting. SiteMeter is useless, so this could be interesting, but it's overshadowed by how bad the estimates are.

4) AdGuru's methodology point is important. Where do these numbers come from? Steve you gave them a pretty big pass on this. Sure "not just toolbar", but what the hell is the sausage made of? How is the data normalized? How big are the data sources?

5) Third party metrics will always be dirty. They will always be disputed, but they should atleast by transparent about how they are doing it. At least I know Alexa is based on reach of 1M Alexa toolbar users.

Not impressed. I hope they build this out with better attention to detail and science.

[iddaa]

yes,thats o'right
It’s a day of mourning in my household. One of my favorite Apple
products died overnight and with all of the reading I’ve done this
morning, there is no way to fix it.
iddaaiddaaiddaaiddaa

[Assaf of Syntryx]

I just like to share the excitement! There is indeed a revolutionary smell to the open/public internet ranking methodologies and quantcast is indeed a pioneer in this area. The run for online business intelligence money is indeed and BI companies should certinly expect significant disruption to their current business. That said, we must not forget that there are serious issues of accuracy and reliability of a quantcast like service. the numbers aren't always on-spot, as some of the trackbacks here noted and the merchant control over their own stats leavs lots of room to codemanipulation and stats boosting... just like the alexa booster but for quantcast type services... which is actually not a too far fetched idea. Think about it.

[Craig Earon]

It's funny how often I get asked how the traffic to our site compares with other similar sites. This at least provides me with a tool that is better than simply making a guess.

While I did note that there was a difference in the actual logfile numbers and the site Quantcast site results, it seems to be consistant from one site to another. I would expect quantified sites to be more accurate.

Overall, the information is very interesting and the cost certainly isn't a problem.