Jun | 23 | 2007

Quantcast: Pushing Analytics Further Or Too Far?

Posted by Benj as Opinion, Tips

Aside from Performancing’s Pmetrics, one interesting new tool that could help bloggers and web developers in understanding their audience is Quantcast. Quantcast is basically a site that provides the service of snooping into your demographic at a level that has never been even been explored in mainstream blogging. Aside from knowing what browsers your readers use, you can now also see the age, sex, gender, ethnicity and other particulars that might help you in further customizing your blogging strategy.

How does Quantcast come up with these numbers? Good question. That’s the exact same thing on my mind when I first read about it. According to their FAQ page:

We collect our data through affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks. All the data we collect is anonymous and contains no personally-identifiable information.

Such a response further opens a whole new Pandora’s box regarding privacy issues and similar concerns. Is Big Brother truly watching. Either that or only a small number of the population is being watched – those with affiliate status or those who actually choose to take part and make the system more accurate.

Check out the Quantcast profile for NBA.com for example. The graphs on this page would show you that the site mainly attracts an African-American market with a bias to the 18 to 24 year old crowd. Is the sampling accurate? I wouldn’t bet on it, but one thing’s for sure, the statistics would become more accurate and precise once this service catches up with mainstream bloggers and mainstream users.

To show you the extent of information that Quantcast offers, the site even gives you a low-down of your readers’ educational attainment and other household related qualifiers. Is this the next step to analytics gold or is this just pushing the envelope a bit too far already?

Comments (2)

2 Responses

Mark
23|Jun|2007

Hi there —

Thanks for using Quantcast! People use us every day to better help understand their audiences in front of invetros, colleagues, or advertisers.

We do not have personal data — we are interested in mass audiences.

Also — we are not implying that NBA is a majority AA audience — we index vs. the Internet average with 100=average. In this case the index = something like 30% of the audience.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have more questions. eMail me at mark at quantcast.

Mark
benj
24|Jun|2007

Hi Mark, thank you for your response. I agree about your take on the NBA stat, I meant that the AA market was the most prominent demographic (and not the majority) given your figures. Thank you for pointing that out.

Benj

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