Web analytics startup Compete.com opened its API for public use today. Websites and applications can now access Compete’s data and incorporate it into their own products.
This is timely for the company, which competes directly with Amazon’s Alexa. Recenty, Statsaholic has been in a very public dispute with Alexa over use of its data, with both sides looking bad. That dispute recently went to litigation. As some services shy away from Alexa, either due to public perception or inflexibility over the Alexa APIs, Compete could grab additional market share.
Compete is using Mashery to handle the logistics and distribution of its API. We wrote about Mashery when they launched late last year. Our previous coverage of Compete is here.
Web statistics mashups, this has a lot of potential. Imagine a Google maps overlay tracking meme’s as they spread across the blogosphere.
These new services are great but why don’t they allow companies to embed a tracker?
Even as a pro service etc.
Seem that would help offer more “complete” stats for companies willing to make it public.
Compete stats only work for the top websites, everything else the noise is so high that makes it useless.
On Compete, only the top 10,000 sites have meaningful data, on Alexa the top 100,000 still have useful data, but beyond that is just for entertainment.
hahahahha to ALEXA
Forget it… Developers aren’t use it….
11. Fees and Payments
Compete reserves the right to charge fees for future use of or access to the Compete APIs or the Compete services and Web sites (collectively, “Compete APIs Services”) in Compete’s sole discretion. If Compete decides to charge for the Compete APIs Services, such charges will be disclosed to you prior.
Don’t use API… USE GPL!!!
Shame it’s only 1000 hits / day.
Yet another missed opportunity from google.
Alexa use to be good.
Compete can seem to.
Google has the tool bar in the browser probably much more then anybody else.
I think the opportunity to really make Alexa third-party style stats tool would be to control some dsn servers such as openDNS, then do some data analysis of that to come up with some more accurate numbers.
To the web masters out there, did you notice your stats drop when FireFox hit the market.
We need a browser independent ranking tool; maybe the telecoms could solve this problem.
@sethop – the default allocation of calls is 1000/day. If you need more, just ask. Compete has provided much larger allotments to API developers who have built cool stuff – contact them at the address given on http://developer.compete.com and they can easily increase the daily hit count past 1000.
I wonder why Alexa can’t provide data itself. Maybe they grab graphical chart from different company. Are they trying to cheat?
Go to Alexa.com, try
graphical chart and type alexa.com
Any software engineers know Alexa might grab data chart from unknown company. I can’t even explain why this works
http://snapshot...a.com?metric=uv
Why alexa can’t make it work it’s own ratings?
Alexa have 611,910 on compete.com
Compete have 0.15 on Alexa.com
Who do you believe? None…
I hope Statsaholic make truthful chart.
How do you know if chart is telling the truth?
easy on the “spamments”
@wayne lambright – Compete also buys data directly from Internet Service Providers. Therefore in a way Compete is very much browser independent. In addition, the Compete toolbar runs on Windows, IE, Firefox, Macs, Linux, etc.
@Marcelo Calbucci – take a look at Compete’s engagement metrics (average time spent, etc). These metrics are very applicable for *all* websites.
@sean percival – great idea. Stay tuned.
Congrats Jay.
Hi Sean — You are not alone in wanting a combined model — Quantcast (my company) launched the Quantified Publisher program last year responding to publishers demand.
We combine data from a variety of sources with direct measurement to derive highly accurate results that are highly representative of your audience. Allowing publishers to participate in the measurement process brings transparency to web metrics – which we think is a good idea. .
Since launch — uptake has been incredible. We have had thousands of sites sign up comprising millions of web destinations. Sites like Fox, Answers.com, Fark, Wordpress, TechDirt, GigaOm, Gizmodo, Gawker, Tagged, DailyCandy, Netscape, Vimeo, Huffingtonpost, Lifehacker, Problogger, Micropersuasion.com etc. etc…
Anyway – given your post, I thought you might be interested.
Best – Mark Schulze, VP, Quantcast
Thanks Mark, i’ll check it out now.
Our smaller blogs like pretty stats too.
Kudos to Compete for offering a free API.
It seems that the “new kids” like Compete and Quantcast have a better frontend, better utilization of figures and better ideas than Alexa but don’t have the data to become true Alexa-killers… yet!
Compete.com seem already old enough, but when I try my site, it still don’t have enough data. while I try in alexa.com. it have my web statistic.
I don’t think many people download compete.com toolbar.
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