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Posts Tagged ‘Web Traffic’

How Does Compete Get Its Web Traffic Data? At Least One Way Sounds Very Sketchy.

A month ago, Jason Calacanis went on a rant about why everyone should boycott comScore. He felt they were using sketchy tactics to bully people into their pay-to-play model for measuring web analytics. He also noted that their free competitors like Quantcast, Google, and Compete would soon eat their lunch. Both Quantcast and Google (Analytics) offer direct counting of pageviews (but even these methods can be abused). But you may wonder how exactly Compete gets its numbers? It appears, that some sketchy tactics are (or at least were) employed, as well.

We were recently pointed to this post from last month by Ben Edelman, a Harvard privacy advocate. In it, he details the data the Upromise toolbar collects and sends out. This toolbar is used by college students looking for savings on various items across the web, and can be quite useful. But until a few weeks ago, it appears they were also sending web browsing (and more personal) data to Compete without anyone’s knowledge. Writes Edelman:

As shown in the “host:” header of each of the preceding communications, transmissions flow to the consumerinput.com domain. Whois reports that this domain is registered to Boston, MA traffic-monitoring service Compete, Inc. Compete’s site promises clients access to “detailed behavioral data,” and Compete says more than 2 million U.S. Internet users “have given [Compete] permission to analyze the web pages they visit.”

He continues:

Upromise’s installation sequence does not obtain users’ permission for this detailed and intrusive tracking. Quite the contrary: Numerous Upromise screens discuss privacy, and they all fail to mention the detailed information Upromise actually transmits.

The Upromise toolbar installation page touts the toolbar’s purported benefits at length, but mentions no privacy implications whatsoever.

If a user clicks the prominent button to begin the toolbar installation, the next screen presents a 1,354-word license agreement that fills 22 on-screen pages and offers no mechanism to enlarge, maximize, print, save, or search the lengthy text. But even if a user did read the license, the user would receive no notice of detailed tracking. Meanwhile, the lower on-screen box describes a “Personalized Offers” feature, which is labeled as causing “information about [a user's] online activity [to be] collected and used to provide college savings opportunities” But that screen nowhere admits collecting users’ email addresses or credit card numbers. Nor would a user rightly expect that “information about … online activity” means a full log of every search and every page-view across the entire web.

Shortly after Edelman’s post (and a follow-up PCMag.com post), Upromise changed their privacy policy to alert their users that this data is being sent out. But the company declined to state how long the issue had been going on.

Privacy implications aside, it’s interesting that this is one of the ways Compete was gathering data. And it would be good to know where else they get it from. On their site, they only vaguely note that they have “developed a unique methodology created by experts in the fields of mathematics, statistics and the data sciences to aggregate, transform, enhance and normalize data in order to estimate U.S. Internet traffic.” They also claim to have over two million members — but apparently, at least some of them (such as the Upromise toolbar users), don’t know they’re members.

I’ve sent a message to Compete asking them what other means (other toolbars, etc) they use to gather their data. In light of this Upromise fiasco, it seems wise that they should disclose that kind of information. I’ll update if and when I hear back.

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Facebook and the Future of Free Thought

The consumption of news — that formerly-respected category of information outside of humorous cat and music videos that impacts hundreds of millions of peoples’ lives — could be substantially improved by new methods of subscription offered online. Unfortunately, that’s not happening. Numbers from web traffic analysts Hitwise released tonight indicate that almost nothing has changed in 10 years when it comes to popular consumption of news online. The big portals and search engines, delivering their version of news, remain in control. That’s bad for independent thinking and human free will.

If you were hoping that a new world of web technology would empower free-thinking people to subscribe to diverse sources of information and analysis about the world’s news, then Facebook, albeit a little awkward as a news-reading platform today, may be your best hope.

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On Monday we argued that Facebook’s call to users to subscribe to news outlets on the social network could soon make it the world’s leading news-reading platform. Hitwise picked up on that story and ran some numbers today. Their conclusion: Facebook already drives 350 times as much traffic to other websites in the “news and media” category (3.5%) as Google Reader does (.01%). Perhaps more importantly, though, Facebook, Google News (1.4%). and Google Reader together account for less than 5% of news sites’ total traffic. The #1, 2 and 3 drivers of traffic to news sites? Google, Yahoo and MSN – portals and search engines where the editorial judgement is made by centralized algorithms and powerful front-page editors.

So Facebook is the web’s most popular subscription-enabled place to read news; be it from links shared by friends or by becoming a Fan of news organizations like Facebook is now encouraging. That doesn’t mean that Facebook is yet a better news-reading service than dedicated RSS readers are. But it has certainly caught on as a way to read news far better than dedicated news-reading software has. In fact, it may offer the only meaningful chance that the technologies of online self-publishing and simple subscription are going to change the world like they ought to.

According to Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins tonight:

Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%. Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn. News and Media is the #11 downstream industry after Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the social networking site’s traffic. To offer a comparison, 6% of downstream traffic from Facebook went to Shopping and Classifieds last week and 6% to Business and Finance and 15% went to Entertainment websites (YouTube in particular).

We detailed on Monday a number of ways in which Facebook was already the best place for millions of people to read and share news, but when looking at these Hitwise stats it’s important to realize that it’s traffic that’s being counted. So full feeds inside Google Reader deliver the whole story, whereas Facebook snippets require that readers click all the way through to the source site. None the less, a multiple of 350 is a multiple of 350.

Google News, the 2nd leading news reader according to Hitwise, made some nice changes this week around starring stories to track over time. That could increase its marketshare. But Do-It-Yourself subscription to diverse selections of news sources may be contrary to the contemporary human condition, as desirable as it may be. As web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman said in an unrelated post this week about the closed nature of the iPad: “The bulk of humanity doesn’t want a computing experience it can tinker with; it wants a computing experience that works.” The same could probably be said for news about the world, and look where it’s gotten us.

I’m not saying Facebook is a better way to read news than through an RSS reader. I’m saying no one uses RSS readers, even after years of their being as obviously life-changing as many of us know they are. Instead, people are beginning to use Facebook to read news. That’s good, because platforms that encourage independent subscription instead of just consumption of pre-selected news are very important.

Facebook Could Be Our Only Hope (Online)

The big story is of course that the vast, vast majority (like 95%) of traffic to news sites doesn’t come from news readers like Google Reader, Google News or Facebook at all. It comes from search engines and portals. Google, Yahoo and MSN. That’s what these numbers appear to indicate. Sure there’s a long tail of other sites like Twitter, Digg, HuffingtonPost etc. but it’s hard to imagine all those other sources at less than 1% each are adding up to much in aggregate. (We’ve asked Hitwise and await their response.)

Hitwise reported in September that of traffic leaving Twitter, for example, only 3.4% of it went to News and Media sites.

In other words, consumption of online news may not really have changed much for almost anyone in the last 10 years. You, dear reader who probably came here from Twitter or Google Reader or Facebook (maybe Digg if we’re lucky), appear to remain part of a freakishly small minority.

That minority may be disproportionately powerful, driving market trends (maybe) and running circles around information streams online (definitely), but the experience of finding out news about what’s going on in the world may not be a structurally different thing for almost anyone else, as it is for us.

This is your news on portals.

That doesn’t bode well for the long-tail of publishers, small voices given volume by easy publishing tools online. The subscription tools to make those long-tail voices a regular part of our news life have arrived – but no one is using them. Except Facebook, in growing numbers.

Above: News outlets post to Twitter using RSS, manually or with applications like Networked Blogs.

Facebook is the player to watch. Facebook – the dreaded privacy-violating, Farmville-drenched, closed-data, social networking megalith (which is also fun to use and great in many ways) – could be the web’s best hope for transforming the world through the power of online syndication and subscription.

So what are you going to do, Facebook? Are you going to move news about the world to an honored and important place on the site, are you going to reverse your December move pushing Fan-page subscriptions irrevocably public (a hostile environment for subscription) or are you just going to post an occasional post to the company’s blog about how you can use Facebook to subscribe to news feeds – through a tedious process?

I’m hoping Facebook will take this opportunity and encourage its giant nation of users to add subscriptions to diverse news sources to their news feeds of updates from friends and family. That could deliver a tangible improvement to the world’s information landscape, like the internet was always supposed to do.

Become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and get all the most important web technology news and analysis delivered to you on the world’s leading news consumption platform!

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Why is Google Afraid of Facebook? Because Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search

It’s often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company’s categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.

Social networking climbed fast this year, and Hitwise says it just peaked over search for a few days during the communication frenzy of Christmas. Take that, Larry and Sergey – Mark and Ev are right behind you.

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The biggest problem with Hitwise’s numbers is that the company appears to include YouTube in the “social networks and forums” category that is challenging search. That’s a questionable categorization of (Google’s) YouTube, a site that some people call the 2nd-largest search engine on the web. A person certainly can use YouTube as a social network – but we’d guess that far more people use it as a search engine. If YouTube is growing (and this analysis says it is) then search is growing. You wouldn’t think search would have much room to grow, but YouTube demonstrates nicely that there can emerge new kinds of search at any time. Some people argue that real-time search is the next type that will emerge as a growth industry for the search market. Others point to social search and that kind of amalgamation could throw our search vs. social networking equation entirely!

The arguable mischaracterization of YouTube seems to throw a big monkey-wrench in Hitwise’s usually fabulous market analysis, but as a general trend social network is undoubtedly growing. At 2% of web use, according again to Hitwise, YouTube is a major player – but lets think about the rise of actual social networking sites relative to search.

What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web-pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about. We’d be subscribing, more than we ever did by RSS, to syndicated updates from organizations of interest, large and small. It would be (perhaps will be) a very different era and, to be frank, it’s going to be harder to monetize. There will be privacy battles. There will be new platforms for innovation.

It’s a pretty big deal. Things will really change if current trends continue and social networking rises to the top. That’s not as clear as this traffic analyst firm argues that it is, but it could happen. And that’s a big reason why Google and Facebook are rivals.

Classic post: Is YouTube the Next Google?

Check out our research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future.

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Mobile Web traffic increasing rapidly for non-smartphones

Apple’s iPhone changed the way we think about mobile Web access by giving us the “real” Internet via its Mobile Safari browser. Since its introduction, smartphone vendors have scrambled to offer a comparable browsing experience, generally by building a browser based on WebKit—the same engine that powers Mobile Safari. But consumer expectation is driving demand for mobile Internet access for standard cell phones as well. According to data from mobile browser maker Opera, mobile traffic to standard smartphones surged in October, growing 16 percent over September.

Opera Software’s Opera Mini browser is one of the few usable solutions for standard “feature phones.” The Java-based browser actually uses proxy servers to compress and handle much of the rendering of websites using the same rendering engine as Opera’s desktop browser, which is then pushed to the phone and displayed on-screen. This arrangement makes it possible to view even complex pages on meager hardware (by smartphone standards) and helps avoid some of the network congestion and speed issues that can sometimes affect full-featured mobile browsers.

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Runa’s new service looks to turn web surfers into sales

Last year, e-commerce retailers spend $21 billion, or 15 percent of their revenues, in online marketing to drive traffic to their websites. The end result — a dismal 2-3 percent conversion rate between visitors and sales.

Mountain View startup Runa, a provider of revenue growth and profit maximization solutions, is looking to help e-commerce retailers to change low conversion rates with the launch of their new conversion marketing solution. The new web application focuses on converting web traffic into sales while shoppers are still on the website. By determining a consumer’s buying intent, Runa helps to deliver more effective personalized sale price incentives in real-time.

Here’s an example of how an e-commerce site might use Runa: Say you’re shopping online and you decide to choose a new table for your kitchen. As you proceed to checkout, you suddenly decide you want to shop around. As you click to leave the site, a real-time pop-up appears offering you a $60 discount if you agree to buy the item now. By agreeing, the $60 is taken off your total price at checkout. A demo on the site refers to this as a “cart abandonment campaign.”

Runa works closely with the e-commerce retailers to determine goals and what they call “business rules.” These rules are pre-determined by the retailer to decide the individualized pricing each type of consumer will receive. Individualized pricing can take several forms including discounts, free shipping, buy one and get one free specials or no tax.

Conversion marketing is not a new concept. Companies like Omniture, who provide rich data to customers on consumer behaviors, and RichRelevance, specializing in product personalization and relevance, are helping e-commerce retailers find ways to increase sales (there are a number of other companies with similar goals, too). Both companies lack the real-time benefits but are valuable in compiling data over time to help campaign efficiency.

Not convinced? Runa service is offered on a pay-for-performance basis which means that e-commerce retailers don’t have to fork out any up-front costs making it a low risk option if they are looking to jack up sales just in time for the holidays.

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