Say "Bye-bye Alexa!" HitWise is taking your crown!

Hitwise is now providing arguably the MOST accurate internet stats.

[martinibuster]

internetnews.com [internetnews.com]

Australian Internet measurement company Hitwise officially launched in the United States Monday... Hitwise boasts a large measurement pool of 10 million Internet users, whose Web habits are tracked through partnerships the company has struck with Internet service providers ... Hitwise monitors about 25 million Internet users worldwide and boasts coverage of 200,000 sites in 150 industry categories.

These ratings have got to be the most accurate ratings of all if they are stealth monitoring 10 million users at the isp level, with none of those toolbar shenanigans.

[jeremy goodrich]

Sounds like they are beating comScore to the punch, as they are the ones with all the demographic data.

Wow. It sounds like they are really doing some neat stuff - monitoring people at the ISP level like that. Without their knowledge? Fantastic. I can't wait to get the low down.

Will the data have names & addresses too? That would be too cool.

[EliteWeb]

"Do you know what your competitors did online yesterday? Hitwise does."

Sounds dirty to me.

[martinibuster]

Sounds dirty to me.

Well, according to this Press Release [prnewswire.com],

Hitwise has also taken a leadership position in the industry by engaging leading global audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to provide a quarterly independent report on the company's privacy policies...

PWC was Tyco's "independent" auditor, too.

Are you ready for a bath, yet?

[Robert Charlton]

This perhaps answers one of the questions I've had about comScore...

Instead of the $30,000 charged by other measurement providers, Hitwise said it could provide measurement services for $10,000 to $15,000, with pricing varying on seat licenses.

[cfx211]

I can tell you anyone has to be more accurate than Nielsen. We have been trying to get Nielsen to be more accurate for the last 3 months. Their counts of us fluctuate by almost 100% from month to month, and when they hit their peaks, they still are only reporting half of what we are seeing.

We are a major site ranked in the top 2000 by both Nielsen and Alexa, so it is not a low volume issue.

I can also tell you that at least for our purposes, these type of companies are only used to independently verify our traffic in order to land sponsorship deals. There is nothing in their tools that can help us more than what we have internally.

[rcjordan]

>when they hit their peaks, they still are only reporting half of what we are seeing

Yeah, I've known some guys that benchmark the commercial audit services against logs they know/trust. There are some big discrepancies.