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Open Internet Ratings
by Steve
Friday, May 02, 2008
Open Internet Ratings refers to websites that publish traffic statistics about other people's websites.
Alexa is the most well known example.
A lot of us refer to them because we want to know how our publishing efforts stack up against others. There's certainly a vanity aspect with this, but this is also good information to know. You need to set expectations for your websites and your own success in making money from them. If you know that another website, with similar traffic, is more successul at monetizing that traffic, then you know you're not monetizing effectively.
Internet marketers also use open internet ratings to decide which websites to pursue for their own business. It's good to have a website that ranks highly, so as to earn more potential business.
Panel Data
To understand open internet ratings, you have to understand panel data.
Most of us have heard of "Neilsen Ratings", it's the rating system that's used to measure television viewership. The company distributes monitoring devices to randomly picked out households, and keeps track of what television shows they watch.
From that data, they can figure out a "guesstimate" on how many people watched a particular show.
Open internet ratings is also based on the same principle.
Each publisher of these ratings gathers that panel data in different ways. It's how they gather that data that determines the accuracy of their "guesstimates".
Believe it or not, Neilsen is actually one of the two largest sources of website panel data. They have a division called, "Neilsen NetRatings". The other largest source of panel data is Comscore Networks.
Unfortunately, these two companies don't publish their full datasets online. You have to purchase a subscription to their service, and then you can see it. The largest Internet advertising networks out there all purchase it, and use it to figure out which websites to buy advertising from. The biggest websites also purchase it to figure out how much to charge for their website space.
The rest of us rely on the open internet ratings, the free data.
Alexa
Alexa is the most widely used public metric simply because they were the first. It doesn't necessarily mean they are accurate. Quite the opposite. They're widely accepted by all publishers and marketers as being the most inaccurate. But they because they have the largest panel datasets, it's still the most popular resource.
The innaccuracies are due to how they gather panel data. It's collected from a toolbar that people install on their web browsers. Alexa doesn't pick out people and ask them to install the toolbar. It's done passively, by people visiting Alexa, and voluntarily deciding to do it. Because of this, computer geeks tend to make up the lion's share of panel data. So whatever websites computer geeks like to visit, tend to rank very high.
The other problem is that website publishers themselves were installing the toolbar and visiting their own websites frequently to boost their own ratings. The toolbar is not available for Mac computers, so websites focused on Mac computers ranked low.
Also, Alexa was developed in South Korea. Originally, it was mostly South Koreans who installed the toolbar. And for awhile, several South Korean websites ranked in the top 10. These days, they've all moved down, but South Korean websites still rank higher than they should.
However, in April 2008, Alexa tried to address its inaccuracy reputation by incorporating "outside data". They haven't explained what this outside data is. But once they did this, many websites ranked lower, while others ranked higher. The websites that now rank lower claim that it's more inaccurate, while the websites that now rank higher are much happier.
Quantcast
Quantcast is actually my favored open internet ratings site. It collects panel data from advertising networks and ISPs. Those two sources tend to reflect a broad-based panel set, from all genres of users. For that reason, several publishers consider it to be the most accurate. But even though the panel set is more broad-based, it's history of data is much smaller than Alexa's. That is, because Alexa has been around a lot longer, it can produce a guesstimate on more websites than Quantcast, even though that guesstimate is based on demographically disproportionate data.
In addition to panel data, Quantcast collects "directly measured data". They offer websites a piece of Javascript they can embed into their pages, and have Quantcast measure the traffic directly. Of course, this is much more accurate than panel data.
You'll notice that I have the Quantcast button on all of my blogs. You can click on it and see my ratings.
Compete.com
Compete.com is the newest entrant into the foray of open internet ratings. They work similarly to Neilsen NetRatings, in that they've build a panel of about 2 million Internet users, and monitor their usage. From that, they come up with a guesstimate on website ratings.
In addition to ratings, they also publish a subscription service that let's you type in your website's domain name, and discover all the keywords and phrases that are used to find your website. They only show you five of those keywords for free, and you must purchase the subscription to see the whole shbang.
Because it's so new, it covers the smallest set of websites.
Technorati
Technorati is actually a blog search engine. It does keep a rating system on all blogs in its database. But it's not based on panel data.
Rather, it looks how many other blogs are linking to yours. If you have links from 5 different blogs, then you get a ranking of 5. They determine that the number of blogs linking to yours is a reflection of your blog's popularity and authority.
The number of links is not the total links of all blogs linking to yours, it's just the number of blogs that link to yours. For example, one blog might have 20 links pointing to yours. But Technorati will only count that as one link. One blog, one link.
While Technorati is the largest blog search engine, they seem to be slow in finding new blogs, as well as new blog articles. It might take weeks for them to discover one. Even if you pinged them, it still seems to take forever to get your blog to show up in their listings. Many blogs seem to never show up in Technorati. For that reason, their rating system has never emerged as a respected metric.
Google Toolbar
Google's toolbar is the most popular toolbar around. Every website publisher has it installed, mainly for one reason, the "PageRank" indicator.
The PageRank displays a value of 0-10. People tend to accept this value as a measurement of a website's authority and popularity, and is one of the most respected metrics today. The higher the number, the more respect your website commands.
PageRank is a very long subject, and I'll cover it in a later article.
Alexa is the most well known example.
A lot of us refer to them because we want to know how our publishing efforts stack up against others. There's certainly a vanity aspect with this, but this is also good information to know. You need to set expectations for your websites and your own success in making money from them. If you know that another website, with similar traffic, is more successul at monetizing that traffic, then you know you're not monetizing effectively.
Internet marketers also use open internet ratings to decide which websites to pursue for their own business. It's good to have a website that ranks highly, so as to earn more potential business.
Panel Data
To understand open internet ratings, you have to understand panel data.
Most of us have heard of "Neilsen Ratings", it's the rating system that's used to measure television viewership. The company distributes monitoring devices to randomly picked out households, and keeps track of what television shows they watch.
From that data, they can figure out a "guesstimate" on how many people watched a particular show.
Open internet ratings is also based on the same principle.
Each publisher of these ratings gathers that panel data in different ways. It's how they gather that data that determines the accuracy of their "guesstimates".
Believe it or not, Neilsen is actually one of the two largest sources of website panel data. They have a division called, "Neilsen NetRatings". The other largest source of panel data is Comscore Networks.
Unfortunately, these two companies don't publish their full datasets online. You have to purchase a subscription to their service, and then you can see it. The largest Internet advertising networks out there all purchase it, and use it to figure out which websites to buy advertising from. The biggest websites also purchase it to figure out how much to charge for their website space.
The rest of us rely on the open internet ratings, the free data.
Alexa
Alexa is the most widely used public metric simply because they were the first. It doesn't necessarily mean they are accurate. Quite the opposite. They're widely accepted by all publishers and marketers as being the most inaccurate. But they because they have the largest panel datasets, it's still the most popular resource.
The innaccuracies are due to how they gather panel data. It's collected from a toolbar that people install on their web browsers. Alexa doesn't pick out people and ask them to install the toolbar. It's done passively, by people visiting Alexa, and voluntarily deciding to do it. Because of this, computer geeks tend to make up the lion's share of panel data. So whatever websites computer geeks like to visit, tend to rank very high.
The other problem is that website publishers themselves were installing the toolbar and visiting their own websites frequently to boost their own ratings. The toolbar is not available for Mac computers, so websites focused on Mac computers ranked low.
Also, Alexa was developed in South Korea. Originally, it was mostly South Koreans who installed the toolbar. And for awhile, several South Korean websites ranked in the top 10. These days, they've all moved down, but South Korean websites still rank higher than they should.
However, in April 2008, Alexa tried to address its inaccuracy reputation by incorporating "outside data". They haven't explained what this outside data is. But once they did this, many websites ranked lower, while others ranked higher. The websites that now rank lower claim that it's more inaccurate, while the websites that now rank higher are much happier.
Quantcast
Quantcast is actually my favored open internet ratings site. It collects panel data from advertising networks and ISPs. Those two sources tend to reflect a broad-based panel set, from all genres of users. For that reason, several publishers consider it to be the most accurate. But even though the panel set is more broad-based, it's history of data is much smaller than Alexa's. That is, because Alexa has been around a lot longer, it can produce a guesstimate on more websites than Quantcast, even though that guesstimate is based on demographically disproportionate data.
In addition to panel data, Quantcast collects "directly measured data". They offer websites a piece of Javascript they can embed into their pages, and have Quantcast measure the traffic directly. Of course, this is much more accurate than panel data.
You'll notice that I have the Quantcast button on all of my blogs. You can click on it and see my ratings.
Compete.com
Compete.com is the newest entrant into the foray of open internet ratings. They work similarly to Neilsen NetRatings, in that they've build a panel of about 2 million Internet users, and monitor their usage. From that, they come up with a guesstimate on website ratings.
In addition to ratings, they also publish a subscription service that let's you type in your website's domain name, and discover all the keywords and phrases that are used to find your website. They only show you five of those keywords for free, and you must purchase the subscription to see the whole shbang.
Because it's so new, it covers the smallest set of websites.
Technorati
Technorati is actually a blog search engine. It does keep a rating system on all blogs in its database. But it's not based on panel data.
Rather, it looks how many other blogs are linking to yours. If you have links from 5 different blogs, then you get a ranking of 5. They determine that the number of blogs linking to yours is a reflection of your blog's popularity and authority.
The number of links is not the total links of all blogs linking to yours, it's just the number of blogs that link to yours. For example, one blog might have 20 links pointing to yours. But Technorati will only count that as one link. One blog, one link.
While Technorati is the largest blog search engine, they seem to be slow in finding new blogs, as well as new blog articles. It might take weeks for them to discover one. Even if you pinged them, it still seems to take forever to get your blog to show up in their listings. Many blogs seem to never show up in Technorati. For that reason, their rating system has never emerged as a respected metric.
Google Toolbar
Google's toolbar is the most popular toolbar around. Every website publisher has it installed, mainly for one reason, the "PageRank" indicator.
The PageRank displays a value of 0-10. People tend to accept this value as a measurement of a website's authority and popularity, and is one of the most respected metrics today. The higher the number, the more respect your website commands.
PageRank is a very long subject, and I'll cover it in a later article.
Labels: Statistics
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