I got a note from a PR person from Compete.com around their relaunch into an Alexa competitor err or is that Hitwise competitor? (p.s. as an aside I went to their site to find a link to a release but couldn’t find anything but a blog post that pre-announced the news last week. So did they really launch today or last week? An existential PR question to be sure).
Compete.com was founded by Bill Gross around social search (i.e. user clicks result, click recorded, result gets promoted for that search). It also has a toolbar used by 2 million people, where the company is collating its user data from.
Unlike Alexa or Hitwise it is making Unique Visitors an absolute number rather than a relative one (reach per million, percentage of traffic etc.).
The data appears to be cleaner than Alexa, presumably because they can balance demographics and not overcount nerds like Alexa does.
Basic trafic data is free. What is more valuable is things like search term volumes that appear to be converting for certain marketers. They would be worth their weight in gold and a service I am sure that compete.com is planning on launching/charging for but first building their brands through bloggers changing their default audience measurement reference from Alexa to Compete. Interesting to see how they do.
