Given unique page hits prove to be less than accurate creates a motivation to shift to thinking about unique visitors. Since theoretically visitors are a higher order view on website traffic and easier to capture at the session level, we can get at least a better picture of the quality of traffic.

Quantcast
In searching an old project, I noticed quantcast has popped up onto the top search page with an interesting set of results.

What I like is the idea that an openly structured freemium site is going to push demographic information about users with a nice interface. What is concerning is the same old sample/projection problem that exists for all other services. Compete does a good job of getting into the browser for users (the more it is installed on browsers, the closer to an accurate portrait of the web it can report since this isn’t statistical sampling). That said, comScore’s methods probably get to a better, more accurate overall picture: aggregating ISP traffic for a macro view combined with a panel.

Traditional Scale + Sample = Projection v.
Long Tail + Interactive = Market of 1
While I think Quantcast could be an interesting option for traditional marketers where big advertisers can find big sites with hefty traffic to support the demographic boxes with quantifiable answers, it is going to have the 800 lb gorilla to deal with in Google post DoubleClick. DoubleClick’s vision of individually targeted ads based on a user’s profile will be fulfilled when connected to Google’s amassing registered user traffic history.

I think it is Too Early to say game over, but looking a couple steps ahead to an even more fragmented web with ever lower traffic statistics per publisher, services like this are going to have to get ahead of the media consumer as a unique profile for targeted advertising/messaging.