Compete to Win
Alexa.com, Compete.com, whichever you prefer they are the gold standard in web popularity tracking. They issue the rankings and scores that keep sites competing for the higher traffic. But, how does it all work? There are no scripts installed on the sites they monitor, they don’t ask permission to place you in the rankings and they certainly aren’t calling random samples of Internet users.
Or aren’t they? Much like the Nielsen Ratings, Compete gets its data from a sample of Internet users (about 2 million) that choose to place the Compete toolbar in their browser. The toolbar sends data back to Compete with the sites they visit and the pages they hit, just like the set-top box from Nielsen…upgraded a little.
So, nothing is exact, only a prediction of what the world at-large is Americans are looking at. They don’t pick a random sample of Internet users, but instead let users opt-in to the program. Those that do are probably the more active browsers, Internet junkies and tech-minded folks. Does this mean that the Internet is being improperly sampled? What about the non-tech-minded folks? The grandparents, the casual surfers, the businesspeople and countless other demographics underrepresented because of their unwillingness, or inability, to install a browser toolbar?
Perhaps there’s a lot more to their rankings than what is seen by the casual researcher, but it seems to me that their method of sampling the surfers is somewhat simple.
