quantcast.com for public web analytics

Researching a competitor I found their "profile" at quantcast.com. Never heard of them, so I dug in, checking out regionalhelpwanted.com and cupid.com.

They do a "panel" analysis of web site traffic, like Alexa, ComScore, and Neilsens. But unlike those last two, they publish their results for free.

Alexa does that too, but I've always seen there data as heavily skewed. By nature, they skew heavily towards webmasters. Matt Cutts from Google pointed this out in his blog. I've also heard Alexa skews heavily toward young Koreans. Whatever.

Quantcast looks cool: they exact material that they present is curious: what web sites the users of a given domain have an affinity for. What magazines they read.

Another cool thing is that they let you put their Javascript on your site, so they can report on you with 100% accuracy. I'd *love* for all their competitors to do that!

But the don't make their methodology or sample size public, so it's all hogwash for now. I'll stick with Hitwise.

Update: looks like I'm musing in good company here.

New code? Bah.

I found myself telling one of my developers yesterday "We've been doing this for years now. If you find yourself coding anything from scratch, you're probably doing something wrong."

In that vain, props to the War of Stuff blog for the code necessary to add Digg, del.icio.us, reddit onto my blog.