Competition is coming to Alexa’s website ranking system. Quantcast began offering free website ranking statistics related on traffic to the site. Quantcast seems to be more consistent than Alexa for the reason that it does not rely on a user community using its toolbar.
Alexa used to be the only free traffic qualification services. However, Alexa’s traffic rankings are distorted because it depends on usage recorded by its toolbar users. A single person with Alexa toolbar installed can increase a website’s Alexa ranking 10-100 fold without any real increase of website’s traffic.
Quantcast’s traffic analysis is based on real data from traffic check points. Quantcast uses traffic and demographic data from many advertisers, publishers, ad networks and ISPs. This data is used to analyze the traffic rankings of more or less 20 million websites (as of today).
Quantcast’s prime goal is to offer a better knowledge of a site’s traffic and demographics for advertiser assessment. It provides a relative traffic overview chart and an predictable monthly U.S. unique visitors. An analysis of WebsiteGear.com on Quantcast reveals a ranking of around 46,000 and a unique U.S. visitor count of approx 10,000 per month. Even if the unique visitor data is less than what our website statistics reports provide, the figures might be a better comparative analysis for two or more websites.
Quantcast also displays some other useful reports such as traffic breakdown among the sub domains and demographic data (gender, age, household income, ethnicity etc.).