Matt Marshall at Venturebeat seems not to stop beating up the webanalytics industry. Last time he posted about the industry during the famous Digg vs. Deliciou.us “fight” and I responded.
This time he again mentions that all big webanalytics solutions have “problems” and I agree with him that since his post in August not much has happened in terms of quality.
But what I don’t like about his posting is the bashing of new Alexa competitors. These competitors are only a few months in the market and nobody should expect, that Compete or Quantcast deliver accurate data for millions of websites. These companies just build a brand new system with high profile engineers as well as statistics professors and in my opinion a little patience can be expected. The Google search engine needed some time to be sophisticated as well, so why not give these companies time to come up with a better solution than Alexa currently provides.
I am still convinced that Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Hitwise, Nielsen, Comscore and others will push the pace and will develop much better results over the next months and years.
Web measurement of the entire internet is not easy at all, but results are still often better than TV or Radio ratings, which scientists try to improve for decades.
