Comscores ranking of dating and social networking sites is based purely on number of uniques. This data is for USA traffic only and clearly shows that number of uniques has little to do with a sites popularity. Although True.com had over 9 million unique “visitors” last month vs 1 million for plentyoffish.com True.com has only 30% more active members.
Bottom line — Compete.com seems useful for tracking uniques, but useless when tracking repeat visitors, which is analogous to usage. Which, I guess, would hold true for any community themed site with lots of members — from the perfectly mundane, such as forums, to the zippy posterchild of the web2.0, Digg.
And, it has implications for web applications and social media – which, are of course only regarded as useful if they’re used; as in, people being engaged, conversing (if its a social site), or actively working with the software at hand (long periods logged on, or multiple visits over a standard period of time).
On the same line of thought, I guess this has particular implications for how social media sites sell traffic.
Selling a simple CPM based on the number of uniques per month may not do it justice – or give accurate information about how active or warm the traffic is.
Alternatively, it may stand to reason that highly active traffic on sites which have tremendous repeat visitors may (or may not), when paired with the right offering, result in a higher clickthrough rate.
Or maybe they develop ad-blindess at a greater rate.
I wonder if anyone has any data on this?
November 5th, 2006 at 12:41 am | Permalink
Hi,
I think you misread Markus’ post. I think he’s trying to say that Comscore (NOT Compete.com) may be “Useless for Social Media Sites”.
Compete data which has been featured on his blog takes a deeper look into engagement.