When Will We See a Real Apples to Apples Comparison Engine?

Back in the old days of the Internet, it was relatively simple to compare site A to site B. Of course most sites fibbed on their numbers, but traffic was traffic. A user would visit a site and record a hit or a pageview. There were no embed options, no video players on multiple sites, no widgets, no Ajax.

Then we received Alexa and later on sites like Compete and Quantcast. Each one has its pros and cons, though most agree that Alexa is the worst of the bunch. Quantcast has the most promise of a real comparison because they let you put the tracking code directly on your site or blog. But the issue with Quantcast is this: why should I put Quantcast on my site, when my competitors don’t and they may wind up overreporting because they take Quantcast’s default numbers.

Last night I had dinner with a great group of people, mostly fashion bloggers, and we discussed widgets for a bit. The big issue with widgets and widget advertising is how will reporting and analytics work. Without a strong reporting engine, sell-in to agencies will be very difficult. It’s easy to look at traditional Web ads on site A and site B and see which one performs better. But what about with widgets? How do you compare effectiveness?

Last night, Mike Arrington posted an article about white-label social networking company Flux and their apparent huge increase in traffic. A chart from comScore shows an enormous increase in traffic for Flux from November 2007 forward. Arrington suggests that the traffic increase is due to, "Flux … had the benefit of not only Viacom’s money but also their brands – at launch hundreds of Viacom properties launched Flux social networks, including their MTV brands."

I wanted to post a reply straight away but had to leave for dinner. The question about the traffic increase is whether it comes from a Viacom push or whether it comes from Flux’s widget strategy? Back in November, TechCrunch wrote about Flux opening up their platform. At that time, they installed the widget displayed below. Not sure if it was a paid widget like the HP printing one, but in any event, did loads on that widget help to boost Flux’s traffic? The widget loads a Javascript on flux.com along with what looks like a customized image for TC for the Flux share. Did either of these hits register to comScore? Now take this share widget, and place it on 200 other sites. If the hit counted, now you get an idea on how quickly traffic can build for Flux. Unlike a normal widget, the issue with these loads (if counted) is that very few (if any) ever visited Flux via clicking the share button.

While I can’t give you 100% proof that this is what’s happening and I certainly hope that it isn’t, this discussion is the most recent example of why we need a real comparison engine. One that can properly handle today’s technologies.

When I met with KickApps to discuss their latest release we discussed comparisons to Ning. It’s not easy to compare KickApps to Ning in that KA isn’t hosted on kickapps.com whereas Ning hosts all of their social networks on ning.com.

The real issue is when advertisers, public relations teams, writers, journalists, etc., make decisions based on numbers they read on one of the current comparison engines alone. I’ve seen it hundreds of times over the past decade, especially with agencies pitching a site to advertise on. Of course, the site in the lead is happy to point you to one of the current comparison engines to show off how great they are. Perhaps there is a startup opportunity here. Not as sexy as a Facebook poke app, but could be very valuable to the industry at large.