Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Alexa, Compete, Quantcast - U.S. Bias Too Much 
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Here is a good example of how "inaccurate" (U.S.-biased) Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast are. Xing is a popular social networking service much like LinkedIn. LinkedIn is very popular in the U.S., while Xing is very popular outside the U.S., mainly in Europe. They recently announced they have 2 million users, just like Simpy (heh). You'd imagine some pretty impressive numbers and charts from Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast, right? Unfortunately, no. All three services are so biased towards the U.S.-only visitors, that Xing's numbers look pretty bad: Alexa, Compete, Quantcast. Ouch!
Xing is clearly not alone. A good portion of Simpy's users are non-American. This is not surprising - Simpy has been translated to a number of languages. If you look at simpy-user or simpy-dev lists, you will notice people from (Western) European dominate in numbers/activity.
Sure, the services clearly state that the numbers they show reflect only U.S. visitors, but what good is that? That's like reporting the population of the planet Earth at about 300 million and saying "but this represents only the U.S.". Give us the rest!
Comments on this entry:
Quantcast is an open and colaborative platform. As such, all sites, including Internationally focused ones can join. Once a site joins we are able to give highly accurate estimates of both US and International Audiences.
For example: http://www.quantcast.com/fotolog.com
or another site
http://www.quantcast.com/wenxuecity.com
notice the two plotted lines? One for Global one for US.
I encourage Simpy, Xing and others to sign up.
I hope this helps!
My best,
Mark Schulze, Quantcast
Mark, thanks for stopping by.
1) if you can figure out U.S. vs. the rest already, why can't you already provide a number for non-U.S. visitors without the site having to join?
2) If you can tell a U.S. visitor vs. a non-U.S. visitor, can you also tell a Chinese visitor vs. a French one? In other words, are you able to break visitors down to a country, and if so, are we going to see those reports on Quancast any time soon?
Thanks.
Glad to be here!
Anyway, regarding #1, we need to directly measure to get highly accurate international reach data. That said, we do have a convergent model, so as we move forward, we expect to have Global estimates. While our focus is currently on US audiences, this of course will change in the future.
Regarding #2 -- We have tons of data that we are working to release over the course of the next weeks and months. I am very excited about it and hope you are as well.
Mark
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