If you own, maintain or manage a website, you eventually will be asked the question of "How does the web traffic to your website compares with the web traffic of a competitor's website". Now most web geeks are familiar with the standard tools of the trade such as public domain weblog analysers (AWSTATS, Analog, etc). You may even own a commercial package such as "Deep Log Analyser" or similar packages. While this information is useful for internal statistics, it doesn't answer the question of comparison of traffic on another company's website.

You can, of course, pay a marketing research company to estimate that information for you, but if you are a small company you may not have the budget for that. There is a solution to this problem and it comes from a company called Quantcast . This company is currently beta testing a specialized search engine to provide traffic information that can ultimately provide web traffic information on a remarkable database of 20 million websites in the United States.

The website provides a simple google-like interface available to anyone with Internet access to enter their favorite domain name and it will return website traffic information and demographic information about the site. This is powerful information indeed!

Initially, I found that the information was not as accurate as my tried and true weblog analyser but it was close enough to answer a lot of "what-if" questions. Indeed, one of the interesting things I discovered was just how wrong I was about the traffic on what I thought were popular websites.

If you do try this site out, I'd also suggest that you click on the "Index" link at the bottom of the page. As I mentioned above, their database contains over 20 million websites, but the Index page will give you access to the actual websites and their ranking in the database. Surprise, surprise, the major search engines all get the top listings (like Yahoo and Google). At the bottom of the Index page is a link to a text database with the top 1 million websites ranked from 1 to 999,999. If you are luckly enough to be in that top 1 million ranking, you can search the list using notepad and scroll up to see those sites with lower ranking than you, and scroll down to see those your website's traffic beats. This is cool information! So far, I've read through roughly 20 percent (did I mention I was a Web Geek) but it will take me a few weeks to read all the listings.

So, if you need traffic pattern and demographic information about websites for any reason, or are simply curious in nature, Quantcast is the website you can use to get that type of information free! I can afford that price.....

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