ONLINE PERSONALS WATCH — Aug 22 — Nielsen Netratings is now providing monthly rankings to Online Personals Watch (see column on left). Each month you can expect to see the top 15 online personals site rankings from Hitwise, Alexa and Nielsen Netratings. In addition Hitwise provides enough numbers for us to pull the rankings for some additional categories (defined by Online Personals Watch). These categories are; personality profiling, religious focused, black, asian, gay. We use the Alexa rankings for the social networking rankings and adult dating sites. The methodologies used by Hitwise, Alexa and Nielsen, (and also Comscore) are very different. Hitwise pulls their numbers from ISP’s and only ranks by market share. Alexa uses data from it’s toolbar userbase and also only gives a ranking score for websites. Nielsen pulls from a panel and extrapolates numbers such as uniques from it’s representative panel of tens of thousands. Also note, Hitwise and Nielsen categorise online personals slightly differently so, for example, you’ll see TheFaceBook in the Nielsen rankings but Hitwise chooses not to categorise this as an online dating site.Nielsen Netrating to Provide Online Personals Watch with Rankings
ONLINE PERSONALS WATCH — Aug 22 — Nielsen Netratings is now providing monthly rankings to Online Personals Watch (see column on left). Each month you can expect to see the top 15 online personals site rankings from Hitwise, Alexa and Nielsen Netratings. In addition Hitwise provides enough numbers for us to pull the rankings for some additional categories (defined by Online Personals Watch). These categories are; personality profiling, religious focused, black, asian, gay. We use the Alexa rankings for the social networking rankings and adult dating sites. The methodologies used by Hitwise, Alexa and Nielsen, (and also Comscore) are very different. Hitwise pulls their numbers from ISP’s and only ranks by market share. Alexa uses data from it’s toolbar userbase and also only gives a ranking score for websites. Nielsen pulls from a panel and extrapolates numbers such as uniques from it’s representative panel of tens of thousands. Also note, Hitwise and Nielsen categorise online personals slightly differently so, for example, you’ll see TheFaceBook in the Nielsen rankings but Hitwise chooses not to categorise this as an online dating site.
All these ranking systems should be taken with a grain of salt.
1. Comscore used to work by giving away free antivirus via http://www.marketscore.com or offering a fake internet accelerator. If you wanted to higher your traffic you just had to send visitors there. Lately major banks have blocked any user that has comscore/marketscore installed and so have universities. Symantec USED to distribute marketscore yet classified it as spyware. Due to the heat they booted comscore.
More info.
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/spyware.marketscore.html
2. Nielson netratings is the same thing basically a clone of comscore. Basically neilson netratings and comscore track “dumb” users. From what i’ve seen 1 in ~2000 users are infected. So if you have 1 million active users in 30 days there sample size is 500 users. It is possible to detect the users that are infected and force them to remove the software. You can also redirect users to their sites and have them infected thereby boosting your ranking.
More info.
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/spyware.netrat.html
3. Hitwise works at a ISP level and tracks all demographics. Basically no way of faking your traffic. The problem with hitwise is they cover only 20% of the us market so if your big in one geographic area they may not rank your site correctly. Like neilson and comscore the results are heavilly influenced by popup traffic. Rankings should be reported by how many people get behind the login screen. Each company has the ability to do this but none do.
I forgot to mention that some of the above companies used to have their applications bundled with peer to peer file sharing networks. Of course dating sites that advertised on these networks are ranking really high. For instance, hitwise doesn’t even consider date.com a player, yet comscore has it ranked 8th if you compare their 2 lists.
(comscore rankings on the side here)
http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/18/technology/online_dating/index.htm