It used to be that alexa was the only free ranking system in town. Unfortunately alexa is skewed and manipulated beyond belief. I found a new service called compete.com a few months ago and it has changed a lot since then. In the last little while it has got super useful as they have added things like number of unique visitors to the site per month, average pageviews and average session time.
Compete.com currently only tracks traffic in the USA.
| Unique | Pageviews/session | Avg Session time | |
| Plentyoffish | 1114k | 27.3 | 16:40 |
| okcupid | 500k | 37.7 | 14:08 |
| matchdoctor | 180k | 17.2 | 10:02 |
| true.com | 9100k | 9.6 | 6:13 |
| match.com | 6300k | 22.7 | 13:26 |
| singlesnet | 3000k | 22.2 | 9:26 |
| eharmony.com | 2600k | 20.7 | 13:44 |
| americansingles.com | 2400k | 28.7 | 10:57 |
| Mate1 | 2200k | 3.6 | 2:25 |
To see for your self check out compete.com you can also click on the pageviews tab to get a trend of pageviews over the last year or session time.
I have asked them to dig a little deeper into the data and give a break down of monthly logins of dating sites. This is something the industry desperately needs a ranking based on USER ACTIVITY and we all know how much the useless “unique visitors” number from comscore, nielson and others are quoted.
I will post the numbers when they send them to me next week. No doubt compete numbers will be extensively quoted in the media 
. Ranking sites based on user activity will certinately spark a PR war.
October 25, 2006 at 11:05 pm |
Thanks for the tip! I have always question Alexa.
July 17, 2011 at 12:30 am |
I still prefer Alexa
October 25, 2006 at 11:13 pm |
Any idea where they are supposedly getting the information from?
October 25, 2006 at 11:43 pm |
Unrelated:
http://www.johnchow.com/making-money-with-domain-names/
October 25, 2006 at 11:55 pm |
Mayo, if I was YE, i’d stay out of sight to.. registering misspellings of hugely popular domain names and then profiting off of trademark infringement is getting a lot of people in hot water. I believe yahoo and google have a few court cases over it.
http://blog.compete.com/index.php/where-do-these-numbers-come-from/
October 26, 2006 at 6:38 am |
Yeah well you see with POF what happens is that you have hit a natural adddiction for humans. And everyones goes to your door to find it.
Meet that person. – basic need of life… (friend/dating)
- Food is another one ( you always need )
- Tim Horton ( you always need ALOT ) i do !
I sell art so its not the same market.
It comes to about 30 people worldwide that decides the art market worldwide.
When i sell a painting for 3 k and I get.. hey Yan good job.
My initial reaction is wow good $
When I sell a painting to someone at 800 $ and hes all happy and after 3 years on his wall send me an email just to say hi!
I’m like trilled! and paint like a mad man.
After years of painting you get so quick at making a painting that you average like 100 $ – 500 $ easy.
Then you sell it period.
I have always worked alone on my things and its a passion.
Thats how you make it out…. period.
My price of paintings go up bit by bit … after a while you have 500 paintings in homes in the wall of there house.
500 paintings x 10 people that see your art in your client’s home…
Thats banner advertisements on there walls…. !! every day!!!
Wow a bit off topic!!
Cheers,
Markus
October 26, 2006 at 11:53 am |
Markus,
I would also stay far away from publicity cover, and
most possibly transfer my ass to some offshore
haven(I think he resides now in China, im not shure…)
Markus Says:
October 25th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
Mayo, if I was YE, i’d stay out of sight to.. registering misspellings of hugely popular domain names and then profiting off of trademark infringement is getting a lot of people in hot water. I believe yahoo and google have a few court cases over it.
October 26, 2006 at 11:55 am |
Oh Canada is also not so bad to cover your money,
look at all those call centers in Vancouver, Toronto,
Montreal…. those guys are making so much money
that some modern internet spammers can cover their
faces (i dislike spammers and boiler room guys, but
that is also an industry….)
October 26, 2006 at 3:42 pm |
How does Compete (and Alexa) deal with web widgets?
Does YouTube get credit for their videos on MySpace?
Would PlentyOfFish get credit if there was a PlentyOfFish Google Gadget on million of people’s blogs?
If Akamai is used to host content does the original owner get credit or Akamai?
October 26, 2006 at 6:47 pm |
Interesting site.
Unfortunately it only seems to be estimating somewhere between 1/3-1/2 of our page views. We’re on the lower end, around 95k on Alexa and 54k here.
I suspect as they get more installs, it could be quite useful.
I’ve found http://www.trafficestimate.com/ to be far more accurate regarding our unique visitors. I use this fairly regularly, and for the smaller end sites it seems accurate enough. But I don’t know how well it stacks up on the high end.
October 26, 2006 at 6:53 pm |
trafficestimate is several orders of magnitude out for me.
M keep in mind its USA traffic only that is being measured
October 26, 2006 at 7:59 pm |
I’ve factored that in – we see about 80% US traffic. I just checked our internal server logs, and Compete is out by… wow, its out by a factor of 5! It’s been a better month than I thought this month.
I have to say, even traffic estimate is further out than they used to be. I know our server logs do include some robot visits, but not of a magnitude to set things that out of whack.
October 26, 2006 at 11:00 pm |
Why do you even use stat tools?? It seems they are 95 inaccurate…,
stat tools are a complete B.S.
CPM is OK but everyone should use per Click calculation + user tracking of that click (if he’s real or fake)
Basically everyone should use YOUR audited SERVER stats!!!! There should be assembled nonprofit(or at least independent) comitee that would put a open source bencmark tool that would be applied on different servers, and based on those stats calculate the average web rank of the site.
You have different accounting auditors… right??? then why there are not CERTIFIED AUDITORS for web stats????
ALEXA, compete or even HitWise are not certified…. and most of all NOT OPEN STANDARD!!!
October 26, 2006 at 11:54 pm |
Also Cost Per Mile impressions is total bullocks… why should i pay for impresson if your web user will NEVER enter my website and generate profit, i want that your user clicks my ad AND becomes my user if he’s interested.
Impression cost is moronics, for example PoF can have 1Billion PUF’s (page views) and not even one click that is heading my way. Only way the business should be made is by clickstream of users that go to me as an advertiser and nothing else….
See this:
http://evhead.com/2006/08/pageviews-are-obsolete.asp
Compare MySpace stats – BLOATED ONE’S vs. NORMALIZED (why should i pay for YOUR BLOAT???????!!!!!!!
)
October 27, 2006 at 12:33 am |
Mayo,
The idea is to use the stats sites to size up your competition. You use your own stats to judge the accuracy of the stats sites. It’s intelligence info. Yes a lot of people try to manipulate it, so their competitors will misjudge them. That’s the whole game… Find out what the other guy is doing but don’t let him know what you’re up to. Kinda like war.
October 27, 2006 at 12:43 am |
Marc,
Hah, then there is no need to have real stats…
All i need is to spam my sites (bot many Alexa toolbars, and direct them to roam my pages, and bloat the stats)
OR
Block Alexa et.al. and underrate my web stats
It seems stats are only for the PR bloat and nothing else
Then after all, i don’t even have to look at stats becouse they are fake, like when you listen to your prime minister
, you nod several times and then you send him to hell and laugh :O
Cheers
October 27, 2006 at 3:00 pm |
But who said rankings all seem to take the dominance? Please take up the rankings on a global scale.
October 27, 2006 at 3:01 pm |
It does not mean to offend as your reviews seems to have a dominace only in your country!
October 28, 2006 at 1:31 am |
Traffic is global.
Behavior surfing the user search and what people invent in the back is all that decides the traffic .
Its like a dir /p dir *.painting.
Now people are trying to dictate how a normal user surf. Or a joe casual does. Right?
type a word ex: painting yanook Objective to find painting Yanook
Look the only way to make money is to know the logistic in the back.
This is no addvertisement.
Ok you have like 5 k ok you open up many different entity of site.
Back and forth… with the right code you generate trafic.
But you see its AI technology. Its like Artificial Intelengence dude.
Robots!! this is like planting a tree ok… some are nice some are bad.
But hey get that Purple flower you see on the side of the road and man ow man!!!
You got a friggin problem! Ya … its a plant that reproduce its self.
All you see is purple on the side of the street.
Bam there you go!!
Fake traffic, look man the user is put into a a loop.
Of branding… and there is no way out all adds!!!!
Look your in a Jail ok where to now push a brick to get out…. bang 10 cent !
x billions!!!!!
There you go.
Wow that was alot of visioning…
Yanook
October 28, 2006 at 10:59 am |
Here is a ‘new’ company from Checzoslovakia,
i don’t know, you can try it too Markus for your site
and tell us what you think:
http://www.gemius.com/English/index.php
July 17, 2011 at 12:32 am |
Site is down, are they still in business
October 29, 2006 at 12:15 pm |
For my post above:
It seems it’s only for european sites, sorry Markus
December 11, 2006 at 1:55 pm |
[...] “New FREE ranking system better then Alexa by far.” – Markus Frind, CEO of Plentyoffish.com [...]
March 23, 2007 at 6:56 am |
Nice site what we do as google ban our site from google adsense due to they saying our site not meeting policies of good , why why they said this.
http://www.yoursgooglesearch.com
as we boost our monthly traffic in first month almost at 4000/
as also showing from http://www.compete.com
May 29, 2007 at 9:33 am |
[...] If you look at this Compete Chart – you would see the numbers. Plentyoffish, being the best in the list, shows 14:35. (used to be 16:40) [...]
July 25, 2007 at 6:22 am |
compete is great site i like the coop they did with zoominfo , alexa is still quite good and quantcast is not bad too
every thing that brings free good statistical data is more then welcome
by the way you can send your blog or web page to outer space and outlive any thing you know at :
http://www.beinspace.com
April 26, 2008 at 8:03 am |
Thank you for your help.
sungjin4937@naver.com
July 23, 2008 at 10:55 pm |
[...] Ranking system better tan Alexa by far : plentyoffish. [...]
July 25, 2008 at 5:37 pm |
[...] Ranking system better tan Alexa by far : plentyoffish. [...]
August 25, 2008 at 9:37 pm |
How can I talk to Markus Frind regarding a new dating/self improvement website??
July 17, 2011 at 12:33 am |
Send him email or leave a message here.
December 31, 2008 at 4:52 am |
plentyoffiss
June 20, 2009 at 7:56 pm |
The topic is quite trendy on the Internet right now. What do you pay attention to while choosing what to write ?
p.s. Year One is already on the Internet and you can watch it for free.
November 5, 2009 at 10:23 am |
Hi! I’ve found another site valuation tool and it seems to provide competitive analysis for free. I’m talking about http://www.estimix.com .The estimation provided by estimix is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic.
February 15, 2010 at 12:20 am |
how are you?
April 19, 2010 at 4:07 pm |
happy day
)
July 29, 2010 at 2:56 pm |
I would agree that compete is better than Alexa 100% but you have to pay for Compete to get in-depth stats for a website which is why i would recommend the use of http://www.websitevaluebot.com because all the statistics are there for free.
February 3, 2011 at 5:25 am |
Fantastic information. Thanks for sharing.
June 10, 2011 at 2:58 pm |
great service, very useful and vital for serious sites who wishes to grow up and be heard over the serch engines and hence reach more users
July 23, 2011 at 1:27 am |
and most of time compete.com is slow or its just me
September 27, 2012 at 12:22 pm |
nice post, lets check it out