What is Quantcast? No Toolbar Required!
Posted by Jon Lee in Reviews, Web Development, tags: Alexa, Compete, Compete-Snapshots, rankings, showoff-rankings
Quantcast is self-described as an “Open Internet Rating Service�. Essentially, it is another way to measure the popularity of your site. Much like Alexa, it can be used to give your site a “ranking� compared to all the other sites on the Internet. Unlike Alexa however, it does not rely on a toolbar to get its data.How it works
It uses a similar system to Compete, gathering usage data from secondary sources such as ISPs, advertising networks and publishers. Since it doesn’t use a toolbar, one might imagine this data to be less skewed/biased compared to Alexa or Compete but it definitely isn’t the case. Quantcast data is very biased towards publishers. Publishers are web site owners that “publish� a little Quantcast tracking script on their page. It looks something like this:
<!– Start Quantcast tag –>
<script type=�text/javascript� src=�http://edge.quantserve.com/quant.js�></script>
<script type=�text/javascript�>qacct=�p-e0ehyzq2NPV2A�;quantserve();</script>
<noscript><img src=�http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-e0ehyzq2NPV2A.gif� style=�display: none� height=�1″ width=�1″ alt=�Quantcast�/></noscript>
<!– End Quantcast tag –>
This way, every visitor to your page is counted in addition to usage data they gather from ISPs. Within just two days of installing this script, I jumped from my original rank of 650,000 to 278,000. So if traffic rankings are important to you, I’d suggest installing the script!
More than just Traffic
One of the biggest advantage that Quantcast has over Alexa/Compete is that it gives you very detailed demographics of your visitors. I was surprised at what demographics they can give you (accuracy is debatable though). Take a look at this graph for my photo-sharing site (click image to see actual statistics):
Turns out most of my visitors are middle aged African Americans… who would have guessed?! Keep in mind though, I’m sure these demographics come from ISPs (since they can’t possibly come from the Javascript code!) so the accuracy depends on what ISPs are supplying Quantcast with data.
No API = No Showoff Rankings!
To the best of my knowledge, they don’t currently offer an API. I’ve contacted them about using their data so I can add another ranking to my Showoff Rankings widget. In the meantime, they offer several widgets of their own for you to use but of course, they don’t look as nice as mine. 
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