ComScore is refining its website audience measurement system for the purpose of helping advertisers better direct their marketing campaigns. The new system will separate online audiences into heavy, medium and light users.

Comscore, Nielsen, Compete Hitwise and Quantast are the major stats providers. It’s getting more and more difficult to differentiate between them all when you throw attention and widget metrics into the mix.

Via Mashable.

Related posts:

1. Comscore, Compete and Audience Measurements
2. Will Dating Sites Heed The Call to Boycott ComScore?
3. Comscore On EU Dating Sites

Last weekend I stopped by the Boston Coworking party. A room full of Boston’s best web developers, an excellent DJ and free beer. A great way to start my vacation week.

As I have come to expect, I ran into Jay at Compete.com, and I grilled him about what they are up to. The Compete Attention 200 is a new initiative and at first glance looks like it’s based on solid data, that Compete promises will only get better over time. Here’s the list of the top 20 social networks.

Comscore and Hitwise should be scared of Compete. They sell overpriced reporting but the free info is solid. Far superior to Alexa, which clings to life, somehow.

I have been disappointed with how the analyst and reporting firms have covered the dating industry. There are other startup alternatives like Quantast, but who is really getting better data and trends out to the masses? Time for a shootout.

Some of the dating-related sites in the Compete Attention 200:

AdultFriendFinder at #20.
Match at #29.
Eharmony at #80.
Fling at #116.
Hornymatches at #159. Added these guys because they show up in my blog search terms often.

The list included a few other dating and adult sites that weren’t in my browser cache already, shame on me for letting my research falter.

No related posts.

Compete has the latest on traffic to mainstream dating sites.

• True, previously ranked 9th in terms of member logins, moved into the top five sites. Like many dating services, True sends email as a way to encourage paid subscriptions, and in February nearly 60% of member traffic came through this channel.
• Match took the lead with nearly 20 million member logins in February.
• PlentyofFish.com, the largest free site in the group, was pushed out of the top 5 but still captured over twice the member activity of 7th place Mate1, despite being 1/5th its size in visitor traffic.

The threshold for belong to dating sites is apparently 10. There was no indication that members were actively involved in more than nine sites in February. I beat that two years ago when I was up to about 45 sites.

Alexa, the stat provider most often referred to by media and analysts, was blocking other sites that use its data like Statsaholic, which put a much nicer interface on top of the Alexa data.

No related posts.

A mixed bag of news this week for True.com.

Hitwise and other sites are reporting that true.com traffic doubled in the second week of feb. True now has more unique visitors per month than singlesnet and match.com combined which supposidly are #2 and #3. New myspace campaign ?
Paradigm Shift

The (Florida) House has quite a number of committees meeting today; however, most of the bills are really nothing special. The Environment and Natural Resourcs Council will consider HB 531 by Rep. Kevin Ambler, which requires online dating services to provide a “dating safety�? disclosure, including whether the site conducts backround checks on its members. The bill is being pushed by True.com, a site that conducts background to weed out married people and criminals.

The State of Sunshine. Spyware Ad Injectors
Deskwizz/Searchingbooth, Right Media and Ad-Flow (Rydium) Injecting various ads into True.com

No related posts.

According to Alex Mindlin at the New York Times (reg req’d), men and women are about evenly balanced at major dating sites, it’s the niche sites where women often outnumber the men.

I would like to know how Hitwise knows if visitors are men or women. Too bad they didn’t list the breakout of the sexes for True.com, Mate1 and some of the other dating sites which rely on scantily-clad women in their advertising.

Here are the top 10 Dating Industry search terms for January 2007.

No related posts.