[markwelch]

I noticed an ad today for Compete.com on TechCrunch. They are targeting market-research users of Alexa, and present quite similar information. The site and toolbar include "deals" links for each domain, so I am naturally curious whether these folks are hijacking affiliate links, and I'm also curious how all their data is gathered (e.g. do they draw data from parasite apps, or perhaps siphon data from Alexa or other sites without permission?).

[Frepontaine]

Originally Posted by markwelch

I noticed an ad today for Compete.com on TechCrunch. They are targeting market-research users of Alexa, and present quite similar information. The site and toolbar include "deals" links for each domain, so I am naturally curious whether these folks are hijacking affiliate links, and I'm also curious how all their data is gathered (e.g. do they draw data from parasite apps, or perhaps siphon data from Alexa or other sites without permission?).

Hi Mark,

Thanks for noticing the ad and checking out our site and toolbar. To clarify, our deal links are currently powered by coupon mountain, whom we are partnered with.

Our data is collected from over 2 million people by way of ISPs, ASPs, our opt-in panel and the Compete toolbar. We use a unique methodology created by experts in the fields of mathematics, statistics and the data sciences to aggregate, transform, enhance and normalize data in order to estimate US internet traffic.

For more information about compete.com numbers and services you can check out our FAQ at http://blog.compete.com/2006/12/11/c...-site-metrics/
(Theres a link to our FAQ in that blog post as well).

[webworker]

Alexa has some interesting information, but I've never installed the toolbar.

Alexa