Quantcast.com is a new “Open Internet Ratings Service” that I learned about from Paul Allen. It’s a free service that looks nice, runs quick, seems to have a good amount of data, but with questionable accuracy. Quantcast says this about their service:
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.
Their FAQ tells more about them, how they get their data (affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks), etc.
From a query, like techcrunch.com, you can view demographics (gender, age, household income, ethnicity, head of household education, and children in household), audience keywords, common audience (other sites these visitors go to, and “siteographics” which define as:
Quantcast’s Siteographics™ show other sites an audience frequents, which can reveal lifestyle and behavioral traits. The Siteographics section of a site’s profile shows other sites that the audience is likely to visit, and the index indicates how likely, where 100 is neutral. For example, an index of 300 would mean visitors are three times more likely to visit the correlated site than by random chance.
Quantcast.com also shows an estimate on unique visitors, and what kind of visitors they are (passers-by, regulars, and addicts). I would guess there are a lot more regulars and addicts than is being counted here.
Like alexa and compete.com you can compare estimated traffic to websites. I created a comparison between Hitwise, Alexa, Compete.com, and Quantcast, and results are interesting. It seems Quantcast.com is in quite a growth stage, Hitwise doesn’t show up on Quantcast’s graph, Alexa is pretty constant, and Compete.com had a spike at the end of last year. Interestingly the data for all of them except Quantcast is missing for the last month or so.
I ran the same comparison on Alexa (note, you can’t compare anything with alexa.com and they don’t even rank themselves…interesting):
Quantcast seems to have a lot of interesting features, all for free, and features that seem to combine features from all of the others. Is it better? Or are the estimates not very good? With a lot of SEO blogs, even popular ones (SEOmoz, TopRankBlog, MarketingPilgrim, SEOBook), Quantcast says “We have sparse data about [domain name]…”.
This will be an interesting tool to play with more and compare with the others. If you have some interesting comparisons, please comment below or blog them yourself!
