Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection

Compete Graph Hosted on Zooomr

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest is compete.com. On the surface, Compete is a just another search engine on the web. They use Yahoo! to power their search results and while their interface looks a lot cleaner than the Yahoo! home page, when it comes to search technology, there really isn’t anything all that special about the results. If Compete was just a search engine, it would be just another average site on the net, but what makes Compete truly special is their site snapshot feature that allows you to look at an analysis of traffic that different websites get.

In many ways, Compete is very similar to Alexa, but on steroids. Instead of just tracking how one site ranks compare to others, they break down their data to a level where you can see an estimate of the number of unique visitors to a site, the amount of time that web users are spending at a page and the number of repeat visitors to a site. Like Alexa, Compete relies on statistical sampling to come up with their estimates, but unlike Alexa, they utilize a more diversified sample pool for there statistics.

This means that their snapshot tends to be more accurate then the stats you see on Alexa, but like Alexa, there are still a few shortcomings. If your site doesn’t get a lot of traffic, than their sample pool may not have enough data to get an accurate picture of what your traffic looks like.

It also means that if an abnormal number of people in their sample group who visit a site more then then the rest of the population, it can distort the traffic stats as well. I’ve been watching the site for about three months now and for the most part the traffic numbers look like they are accurate, but I have noticed a few anomalies. For example, if you take a look at the traffic estimates for Digg, it seems to show that Digg is receiving approximately 10 million unique visitors per month, but if you look at the traffic estimates from last October, it reports that the site was only getting a couple million unique visitors each month. Last year, Digg claimed that their internal numbers suggested that they were getting about 20 million unique visitors per month, so I’m not really sure how to look at Compete’s data, but at the very minimum it’s fascinating to look at, even if it isn’t always 100% accurate.

Perhaps even more remarkable then the public data on Compete’s site, is some of the private statistics that the company is tracking as well. Last week, Matt Pace wrote a fascinating analysis on Blockbuster and Netflix’s traffic and it turned up some interesting facts about both companies.

In the report, he was not only able to accurately predict the number of new subscribers that Netflix picked up during the quarter, but was also able to show that 58% of Blockbuster’s traffic is being driven by subscribers accessing their site from laptops that Blockbuster has put into their store locations. This is fascinating data indeed and shows that Blockbuster’s total access may be expanding the size of the online DVD market, by giving subscribers who do not have internet access, a way to still subscribe to the service. While I disagree with some of the conclusions made in Matt’s analysis, I still felt that it was one of the best articles on Netflix vs. Blockbuster, that I’ve read in a very long time.

Congratulations to Compete.com on winning this week’s site of the week contest. I’m looking forward to watching the site, as the service continues to develop. If you would like to nominate your own site for the site of the week contest, feel free to email me at Davis (AT) DavisFreeberg.com for consideration. In the meantime, here are the nominations for next week’s site of the week.

Bauns

The Movie Quote Generator

Find A Grave

Posted on January 26th, 2007 by Davis
Filed under: Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Netflix, Site Of The Week