My pal Angela Penny wrote a piece examining the sites on “Techmeme’s” leaderboard using data from Compete. She didn’t use Quantcast because for many of the sites there was no data or the numbers looked too small.
I would actually be very happy for Allen Stern if he was pulling more traffic and making more money at CenterNetworks than either GigaOm or TechMeme itself, but I’d sure be willing to bet $1000 that if I could examine the traffic logs for all three sites, CenterNetworks would place third out of three.
I simply do not trust software based tracking like Compete and Alexa – where the software is mostly downloaded by gearheads, which skews the data. On top of that, they seemingly can be easily gamed. Someday if most people are participating in Quantcast, I would trust the #’s as my own experience is that it is very accurate and sadly you can see the paltry (and diminishing)statistics for TVbytheNumbers.com – we’re still very new though and figuring lots of stuff out. But the Quantcast data is very accurate.
Not a lot of sites are “Quantified” and I do not really trust Quantcast’s panel data for smaller sites that aren’t quantified (I do tend to trust it for larger sites though). But I definitely trust it, based on my own experiences with using Quantcast tracking for sites that do use Quantcast tracking. So I trust it for GigaOm and for Calacanis.com which are quantified
Angela noted that Allen Stern’s CenterNetworks shows zero traffic in Quantcast. I suspect that is because Allen stopped using Quantcast tracking altogether, but did *not* switch his account settings on Quantcast to switch from “Quantified” to “panel based”.
For purposes of apples to apples comparisons I think something like ComScore or NetRatings is the way to go and I hope Angela succeeds in her quest for good data (she’s working on it).
