Does anyone use Quantcast to measure traffic for websites? Blogs?
Comparing traffic on websites interests me. Until recently Alexa was the only site I was aware of to compare for example Active Rain and other sites. "Using Alexa to Compare Traffic Across Sites" Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide, June 7, 2006.
Little itty biitty brand new Localism's Audience vs. the lots of things - Alexa graphs!
Active Rain vs. other social networking sites, incl. Dogster.com, Catster.com, etc. - Alexa graph!
Active Rain vs. MyBlogLog.com and others -Alexa graph!
Active Rain vs. other real estate blogging such as RealTown Blogs -Alexa graph!
The problem is Alexa is skewed. Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide described it:
"All good stuff, but remember to take these statistics with a grain of salt. As Matt Cutts of Google discussed a while back, the type of people visiting a site can definitely skew these results greatly and considering Rain City Guide is in Amazon's backyard, we're more likely than most to have traffic from people with the Alexa toolbar installed. "
Much more eloquent than 'Alexa sucks.' Alexa tells you on their site why the numbers are skewed.
My fairy blogmother Fran Flynn Thorsen who is a big fan of RTBlogs (my other blog is a Real Town Blog) but not a big fan of Active Rain suggested an alternative to Alexa.... Quantcast: "Find ratings for 20,084,935 sites"
"Quantcast is the world's first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of millions of web sites. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.
Quantcast is a team of web analytics experts building powerful statistical technology to understand internet audiences. Quantcast helps web publishers of all sizes understand the composition of their audiences and attract higher advertising rates, and helps advertisers and agencies find elusive online audiences wherever they might be. This web site allows anyone to view audience reports on hundreds of thousands of websites. "
Quantcast scores for some blogging sites I am familiar with:
realtownblogs.com (rank 273,018)
activerain.com (rank 140,829)
raincityguide.com (rank 84,002)
The lower the score the better...lower rank (closer to 1) if I am not mistaken.
Quantcast would not give me a score for my RT Blog, Discover Columbus but it gave me a great little graph for November 2006. It gave me this info. My blog is a subdomain of realtownblogs.com there are 2500 + blogs many not on this list obviously.
Top SubdomainsSubdomain % who Visit
realtownblogs.com 100.0%
bonnieerickson.realtownblogs.com 16.1%
cincinnatihomefinder.realtownblogs.com 11.8%
dlefevre.realtownblogs.com 10.8%
steveho.realtownblogs.com 10.5%
cflowers.realtownblogs.com 5.9%
coachingcorner.realtownblogs.com 5.6%
shaveheadlake.realtownblogs.com 5.5%
marioncountyflorida.realtownblogs.com 5.4%
joeann.realtownblogs.com 5.3%
alisa.realtownblogs.com 5.3%
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Maureen :: I had never heard of it so, I checked it out. It had us (realestateshows.com) listed at a rank of 12,598 out of 20,084,980 sites. But the data was so far off. They had our estimated monthly unique visitors for November at around 90,000. Our actual unique visitors for November was over 500,000. The problem with these sites is that they require a special javas cript to track your pages accurately. There are too many of these places for people to populate their code with every java script just so you can show up on the latest ranking accurately.
I't's hard to compare traffic on these sites when the numbers are so skewed.