London-based market research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) has acquired Compete for $75 million. Another $75 million in possible earn-outs through 2010 brings the total acquisition price up to $150 million. Publicly-traded comScore, by comparison, has market cap of $570 million. TNS will use the data culled from Compete’s panel of 2 million Web surfers to measure online purchasing behavior and the effectiveness of online ads. Compete started out as an Idealab company, and has raised about $43 million since 2000. Other investors include Charles River Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Partners, North Hill Ventures, Split Rock Partners, and William Blair Capital Partners. They were undoubtedly probably hoping for a better outcome, but a solid double is better than a strike out. (Update: Here’s the Compete blog post about the deal).
Compete’s revenues in 2007 rose 50 percent to $15 million, but it lost $4.5 million. Compete offers Web traffic stats for free on its site Compete.com, and competes with Alexa, Quantcast, (both also free) and comScore (not free). According to Compete’s own stats, it attracts about the same number of U.S. visitors a month as Alexa (727,000 for Compete vs. 758,000 for Alexa), but Quantcast is the leader with more than double that (1.9 million uniques).
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.
All web analytics track your activity somewhere along pipeline connecting your computer to a website’s server. Comscore tracks traffic trends on computers of 2 million users. Hitwise catches traffic at the ISP level and matches it up with demographic data they collected. Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa differ from these other web metrics companies by tracking traffic on the computers of users who installed their tool bars. Each of these services gauge critical marketing metrics such as unique visitors and page views.
However, some people argue that the page view is no longer a proper measure of a website’s heft. New web page design principles such as Flash and AJAX are making constant page requests obsolete. One of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon is Justin.TV where you can log on and never refresh the page. This is great news for web users, but it’s sowing confusion among advertisers over how to peg a site’s true advertising appeal.
Comscore, who’s currently looking to go public, has been evolving their metrics to keep up with the changes. They recently announced their “visit” metric after facing some heat by BusinessWeek over ranking MySpace above Yahoo’s in monthly page views last November. The visit metric was meant to gauge user engagement by counting the number of unique requests for a site at least a half hour from the last request. All those pesky MySpace page requests would be lumped into one visit, giving a fairer idea of how often each unique user was engaging with a website each month. It had the result they wanted, bumping Yahoo back on top.
Compete also has a visit metric. But today they also launched a new metric called “attention,” which argue see as a better measure of user engagement. Attention is the total amount of time U.S. users spend on a website as a percentage of total time spent on the Internet by all U.S. users. It’s analogous to Alexa’s reach metric, which tracks the number of visitors to a site as a percentage of total internet users. Compete’s attention metric is like airtime, whereas Alexa’s reach is more like audience size.
According to Compete, we spend about 1% of our internet time on YouTube. Compete also tracks the change in attention over time, called velocity, unique visitors per month, site visits, page views per visit, and average stay.
