Sounds Like Hitwise and Comscore are Not Worth the Money

I just read Marcus Frind’s (PlentyOfFish.com) blog and he has a good post about metric sites. I put a lot of value in to what Marcus says because most of the time I have found he is dead on with his ideas.

I really like Marcus, because like me he is a one man operation up against very large companies like match.com or eharmony that have tons of people and servers.

His posts talks about the big paid metric sites like Hitwise and Comscore and how they are inaccurate and how a free site like compete.com is actually more accurate.

“I’ve now stopped spending 10’s of thousands a year on these services as the data is pretty much useless, compared to compete.com. From now on I am going to stick to using compete.com as they actually have relevant data that has some kind of context. Not only can I see the uniques, actual monthly visitor counts, pageview stats etc etc but I can see that on a daily basis. Why on earth is anyone going to pay comscore $60,000 a year for 12 reports that basically amount to a “light version” of compete.com which happens to be free? “

I find it interesting that a free site like compete.com is actually better to use than HitWise or Comscore that cost $40K-$60K a year to use.

So when I am comparing my site to my competitors on this blog I will be putting more weight on compete.com data and not worrying about trying to afford the paid metric sites.