Trying Out Compete.com

With the questionable business behavior around Alexa, and the bubbling buzz on engagement metrics, and the announcement of a new API, this morning seemed the time to give Compete.com a thorough evaluation, checking for confirmation of Alexa's recognition of the meteoric growth of Free IQ over the last month.

Compete captures the rise of Free IQ to a top 10k site:

Compete also does the basic Alexa-style competitive user reach tracking:

Compare this to Alexa's similar view.

Compete's interesting deviation from the standard practice is computing the percent of attention a site receives across all the internet focused attention in their participant pool -- essentially the "temporal share" of a site:

The Compete site isn't very upfront with their usage stats, but I did see a reference to 2M users. The ComScore panel is only 200k users, but carefully balanced across demographics. Compete, and Alexa, which rely on installation of toolbars, likely over represent the geek population. None the less, they provide real insights, and it's generally been true that the geeks lead the way for the masses... though some of the new 2.0 tagging, presence sharing, etc may tap the larger marketplace's technology adoption capacity.

On the measurement side, these new applications are challenging traditional page view metrics. A great post over at WAA paralleling this change to the history of science in physics. Certainly, the attention based focus of Compete offers a compelling alternative to pageviews for business success, but the challenges of assessing clickstreams and usability in web 2.0 apps is a slightly thornier problem. More to come on that front with an upcoming scientific publication...