Media Guy's Pop Pick: Compete.com

Our Columnist's Current Media Obsession

by Simon Dumenco
Published: May 14, 2007

My name is Simon, and I'm an Alexaholic -- make that a recovering Alexaholic. Alexaholic.com, of course, is the indie site that used to automatically draw website-traffic data from Amazon's Alexa.com into a mash-up to allow "hard-core traffic-chart junkies" to compare competing sites against each other on a single page. Alexa got cranky about it, though, suing Alexaholic's founder and forcing him to change the site's name (he came up with Statsaholic).

Compete.com offers stat-junkies their web-traffic fix.

While the tedious Alexa vs. Alexaholic fight played out this spring, my attention drifted to competing web-traffic-measuring site Compete.com, the creation of Overture and Idealab founder Bill Gross. Compete has lately beefed up its analytic tools; I love its Engagement, Growth and Visitors views, the latter of which offers a concrete estimate of the number of visitors to any site (and its competitors), as opposed to Alexa's mystifying Daily Reach and Rank.