Jason Calacanis (Weblogs Inc, Maholo) has been writing a weekly email newsletter for Internet entrepreneurs for a while now (Sign up). Jason is an old soul in the Internet World, I remember going to some of his Silicon Alley parties in NYC circa 1996. This week the title of Jason’s latest missive is Why We Should Boycott ComScore.
Quantcast and Compete (with Alexa trailing far behind) is where those of us who don’t spend $10,000/year for stats go for our traffic intelligence. I used to be a big fan of Compete (Boston company) but the prices seem to have gone up and the paywall became more restrictive. I have the Compete.com plugin in Firefox. The Compete stats for every site I visit show up in the bottom of the browser. I look at every site I visit and when I open up Safari or Chrome I look down at the bottom of the screen, only to be disappointed when I don’t see the Compete traffic stats.
Lately, Compete has been screwing up. They, along with every measurement firm, often drastically under-report traffic stats, but the consistency of the old Compete seems to have vanished.
I mostly rely Quantcast, which is free, but still has spotty stats for most dating sites and doesn’t have a browser plugin (come on!).
I’m surprised that Google hasn’t made it’s Analytics data more public like Quantcast. Everyone uses it, why not take the lead and make the data publicly available (opt-in of course)?
In the online dating market, what I care about most are trends. Is a site’s traffic trending up, down or flat? It’s amazing to see the top 10 dating site traffic modulate over a year or more time in accordance to changes in advertising spend and feature roll-outs and other changes.
Trying to nail down exact numbers is futile, and ComScore isn’t doing anyone any favors with their latest extortion move. Like Jason says, if Google buys Quantcast and keeps the information free, maybe we can move closer to better traffic measurement without paying an arm and a leg.
Go Sign up for Jason’s email newsletter and read about ComScore and how they are going to start charging $10,000 to correct your site’s stats.
