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Hitwise Acquired by Experian, $240 million in cash

Hitwise has been bought by general analytical service provider Experian (12k ee’s, 3.1bn revenue). News from Marketing Pilgrim, via TechMeme. Incidentally, Hitwise has an interesting approach to collecting stats, gathering metrics directly from ISP’s:

Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyze website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length.

Hitwise also combines this rich ISP data with a worldwide opt-in panel to overlay demographic, lifestyle and transactional behavior across the thousands of websites that are reported on every day.

A great service (though I haven’t used it myself) built on top of a solid technology base and business model = big sale. Congrats to Hitwise!

experian, hitwise stats

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How Google Can Kill Alexa in One Simple Step

Alexa drives me nuts. The fact that their stats are skewed, gamed, and untrustworthy makes them unusable, but often they are the only recourse to add any sort of quantitative analysis to a post. So - it would be great to have a real alternative, and Google has the data, the sharing infrastructure, and the non-evil political will to do so.

Adding a “Sharing” option to Google Analytics and surfacing stats in “site:” searches (for those site owners who have elected the sharing option in their Analytics account) would do the job nicely. Let site owners control the degree of information shared, keep everything opt-in, and rock and roll. I know I’d share my high-level views & visits stats in a second. In addition to providing all of the value Alexa does, it would also add a layer of transparency to making ad-buys - something else I would appreciate.

Here are some ideas on implementation - click each to view the full screenshot.

Of course not everyone would share their stats, and not everyone uses Google Analytics, so I suppose Alexa would persist - but at least it would plant the meme out there that other alternatives can exist, beyond crappy (Alexa) and expensive (hitwise).

alexa, google, hitwise stats

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