What is Compete? A better Alexa?
Posted by Jon Lee in Web Development, tags: Alexa, Compete, Compete-Snapshots, overture, pagerank, rankings, showoff-rankings, technorati
Upon starting Firefox, it reported there was a new update available for the Search Status plug-in that I’ve blogged about before. It now shows 3 ranks in your status bar, PageRank, Alexa Rank and a new Compete Snapshot rank.
Who are they?
You may not have heard of Compete before but they’ve been around for a while! It was started in 2000 by Internet entrepreneur Bill Gross who also started the GoTo search engine, which eventually became Overture (I’m sure you’re familiar with it) and has since been bought out by Yahoo. Bill Gross is undoubtedly a millionaire and I’m pretty sure he started Compete to well… compete with Alexa.
What do they do?
Compete itself is a service that offers users features like phishing protection, deal alerts and “click-sharing”. The real interesting part is Compete Snapshots, the equivalent of Alexa Traffic Rankings.
Like Alexa, Compete bases its traffic ranking on users that have the Compete Toolbar installed. But unlike Alexa, it also draws on many other different sources to estimate traffic data! From the FAQ:
Compete estimates site traffic and engagement metrics based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users. Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multi-dimensional scaling (by age, income, gender and geography) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population. Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources.
Better than Alexa?
The biggest criticism with Alexa is that it bases its rankings purely on users that use the Alexa toolbar (or Search Status plugin), grossly underestimating certain markets of the Internet. Compete solves this by using other sources like ISP data and opt-in panels.
Did I read correctly? ISPs are sharing your browsing data? I’m sure not all ISPs are providing customer usage data but it seems that there are definitely some that are. Full disclosure from all ISPs would provide very accurate traffic rankings but at the cost of your privacy. I reckon it will only be a matter of time at the rate things are going right now.
Make Your Traffic Count
In case your ISP isn’t providing your data to compete, you can always download the Compete Toolbar which is available for IE and Firefox so Mac and Linux users can have their input too.
It should also be noted that unique visitors are counted once a month. And from what I understand, it is on a site-wide basis, meaning individual pageviews don’t get counted.
My current ranking is 394,704 which isn’t that great but looking around the blogosphere, most people’s rankings are about 4-5 times their Alexa rank. Hopefully once more visitors are aware of it and using the toolbar, my ranking will go up!
Another Popularity Contest
Anyway, this looks to be another method for blogs to showoff their popularity in addition to PageRank, Alexa and Technorati Ranking. It will only be a short time before companies like Text-Link-Ads and ReviewMe include this in their calculation of a site’s popularity.
Now I just gotta figure out how to include them into my Showoff Rankings Plugin!
Popularity: 3% [?]
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