Compete Competes with Alexa
by Patrick Ruffini :: January 9th, 2007 11:19 am 
I noticed that a new Web 2.0 analytics service has risen up to compete with Alexa. It’s called (…drumroll…) Compete.
Compete says it relies on a panel of 2 million users and is more reliable than Alexa toolbar downloads. They’re probably right. Alexa, despite its addictiveness, is easily gamed. Their interface is clean and they demystify the numbers by giving you total number of uniques in a month on a site.
This is where they go wrong. By almost any measure, their total uniques number for any given site is low, like 2 and 3 times low. That’s looking at Nielsen data, internal numbers, Google Analytics, Sitemeter — for numerous sites. Does anyone really believe TechCrunch, which gets an average of 86,923 visits a day had just 52,025 unique visitors in November? Even the most viral blogs do no less than 2 to 3 times their daily uniques in a month.
Compete may be lowballing it, but I will say this: at least they lowball consistently. Their traffic curves seem to be dead on, and less herky-jerky than even Nielsen for smaller sites.
Tagged: alexa 
compete stats
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