Category: compete.com

  • My 10 Questions with Guy Kawasaki

    Guy Kawasaki

    Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, Technorati 50 blogger, and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. He was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. His job description at Apple was “to protect and preserve the Macintosh cult by doing whatever he had to do” — how cool is that?!

    Guy is also the author of eight books including The Art of the Start (a must read).

    A few weeks ago, Guy asked Stephen DiMarco and myself 10 questions. We discussed how Compete competes with Alexa and Comscore, how Compete does what it does, site metrics, and Search Engine Optimization practices.

    Enjoy! — Ten Questions with Compete (October 29, 2007)

    The Questions (responses):

    • What exactly does Compete do?
    • What did your investors say when you started giving away your data for free?
    • Do your stats include Macintosh users and Firefox users?
    • How are your results different from Alexa and Comscore?
    • Then should we all remove our Alexa bookmarks and replace them with Compete?
    • Is SEO black magic and bull shiitake or can one increase traffic with a few changes to headers, keywords, etc?
    • There’s often a 10x difference between my server logs and Google Analytics say is my traffic. What accounts for this?
    • Then when people ask, do I give the log answer or the Google Analytics answer?
    • Everyone else is lying, do I lie too or look less successful?
    • What are the most common mistakes that companies make that yields sub-optimal traffic?
    • Then what can I do to increase traffic at Truemors?
    • In two years what will be the top five social networking sites (in order from largest to smallest)?

  • Akismet = Life saver

    Akismet stats for the Compete Blog:

    Compete Blog Akismet Count

    From Akismet’s homepage:

    You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

    They’ve nailed it thus far.


  • Happy 1st Birthday Compete.com! – site stats

    (published on the Compete Blog on 1-Nov-2007)

    For some reason, this is more exciting to some of us at Compete than our real birthdays!

    Compete.com Birthday

    Tell me how Compete can improve!

    As Compete continues to invest in fine tuning and improving our products, metrics, etc. the most important thing to us is to be more useful to YOU. We’d like to hear from you how we can improve compete.com. Please leave a comment, or email us with your feedback and input. We’re listening!


  • Top-50 Websites – Ranked by Unique Visitors; The Shareaholics Emerge!

    published on the Compete Blog on 30-Oct-2007

    Top 50 Domains - Ranked by Unique Visitors - September 2007

    Key Observations (Winners list):

    • The Emergence of Content Sharing: 5 of the top 10 gainers having something to do with sharing content (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg).
    • Traffic to Facebook.com has increased by 14.6M, but hold on…traffic to MySpace.com has also increased by 10.2M during the same time period.
    • AdultFriendFinder.com continues to thrive with nearly 24M unique visitors (up 8.8M this year), but look out AFF, Fling.com is catching up with you quickly. Fling has gained a whopping 17.4M visitors in the past 12 months to reach 18.7M unique visitors in September.
    • Rebranding of Cingular to AT&T helped out ATT.com. All Cingular.com traffic is now channeled to wireless.att.com
    • Digg has been growing faster than Facebook!
    Biggest gainers: Sept ’07
    Unique Visitors
    Sept ’06 Change
    1. youtube.com 47,417,527 25,860,510 21,557,017
    2. flickr.com 25,278,501 7,382,573 17,895,929
    3. fling.com 18,702,338 1,284,273 17,418,065
    4. wikipedia.org 51,648,465 35,650,551 15,997,914
    5. digg.com 18,401,139 2,854,646 15,546,493
    6. google.com 124,544,834 109,080,418 15,464,416
    7. att.com 17,984,849 3,221,543 14,763,306
    8. facebook.com 24,211,448 9,545,359 14,666,089
    9. turn.com 14,296,976 628,718 13,668,258
    10. yahoo.com 130,078,549 116,961,340 13,117,209

    Key Observations (Losers list):

    • Traffic declined to only 8 domains in the Top 50 (Sept ’07).
    • Two Amazon properties on the list – IMDB.com and Amazon.com
    • Two Microsoft properties on the list – Passport.net and MSN.com. My guess is that most of their lost traffic went to Live.com, MSN’s new portal. Live.com is up 10.2M unique visitors during the same time period.
    Biggest losers: Sept ’07
    Unique Visitors
    Sept ’06 Change
    1. aol.com 62,201,981 72,859,584 (10,657,602)
    2. passport.net 16,605,856 23,056,010 (6,450,155)
    3. msn.com 72,402,712 78,701,909 (6,299,197)
    4. geocities.com 16,086,159 20,300,659 (4,214,500)
    5. amazon.com 42,420,889 45,417,807 (2,996,918)
    6. weather.com 16,002,964 18,709,799 (2,706,835)
    7. expedia.com 13,564,006  14,087,085 (523,079)
    8. imdb.com 16,390,522 16,705,447 (314,925)

  • YouTube seems to be *thriving* under Google’s watch…

    GoogleTube

    Exactly one year ago I asked:

    Will YouTube break the Top 10 within 12 months (~50 million visitors)? I think it is more likely that YouTube will hit that milestone than not. We’ll just have to wait and watch.

    YouTube did it, and in record time. Faster than MySpace, Digg and Facebook. In June 2007 (within 8 months of my post) they broke into the top 10 with just over 50 million unique visitors.

    Take a look at the chart below:

    Now let’s take a look at how some of their other key metrics have performed under Google’s watch:

    YouTube Traffic Progress Summary

    Nothing but good news here. Today, more people are visiting YouTube, they come back to the site more often, spend more time on the site each time they visit, and view more videos. All in all, Google is doing well with YouTube, and is managing to hold on to a good thing. However, I hope they keep doing more.