Compete.com

» see compete.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

compete only ever counted americans. that is not a complaint, it is the product: the panel was united states internet users and the output was united states traffic. anything i was actually looking at from ankara came back either missing or wrong by a margin the interface never mentioned, which is the honest reason this one sat outside my orbit for its entire life.

it was founded in boston in 2000. bill gross was one of the three names on it, which matters, because he had already built goto.com, the pay-per-click search auction that became overture and then taught the whole industry where the money was. lars perkins and david cancel were the other two.

what you got for free was two numbers against any domain you cared to type. an estimated monthly unique visitor count, and a compete rank placing that site against everything else the panel had seen. the paid tier, search analytics, told you which keywords were pushing traffic at a site and at its competitors, which is the part businesses actually paid for.

for about a decade this was how an argument about the size of a website got settled. somebody would claim a number, somebody else would paste a compete link, and that was the end of it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually measured ~

none of it was measurement in the sense the interface implied. a panel-based estimate for a site with a few thousand visitors a month is noise with a decimal point stapled to it, and the error bars were never shown. site owners with real analytics could see how far off it was on their own domain and said so constantly.

it survived that criticism for years because the alternative was no number at all. a wrong figure both sides of an argument can look at still beats one side quoting a private dashboard nobody else can check. that is the whole social function of a public traffic estimate and it explains why compete outlived its own accuracy by a wide margin.

~ the toolbar ~

the panel had to come from somewhere. from january 2006 compete ran two pieces of software on consumer machines, the compete toolbar and something called the consumer input panel, both of which watched where the user went and reported back.

in october 2012 the ftc filed a complaint saying the software had been collecting a great deal more than browsing history. usernames and passwords went up the wire, along with search terms and credit card and financial account numbers, none of it disclosed in the way the download page suggested. the agency also charged the company with failing to protect what it had taken. the final order landed in february 2013. it required express consent before any future collection and the deletion or anonymization of everything already held, plus plain instructions for getting the software back off a machine.

the settlement is the sentence worth keeping. the free number everybody had been quoting for six years was assembled out of other people's login sessions.

~ where the number went ~

tns, the london market research firm inside wpp, bought compete in march 2008 for a hundred and fifty million dollars. it went on to run under kantar as another line in a very large research portfolio, and the service ceased activity on 31 december 2016.

nothing dramatic killed it. google analytics had already given every site owner exact figures for their own property, so the guessing business retreated to competitive intelligence, where similarweb and a handful of others were doing the same trick with more data. a sixteen-year-old brand inside wpp was a rounding error and got closed like one.

the citations outlived the source. you still run into "according to compete.com" in trade articles from 2008 and 2009, attached to a figure that can no longer be checked against anything, because the panel is gone and the archive of its estimates went with it. the domain itself expired, cleared an auction for over sixty-five thousand dollars in 2020, and today answers with a sales page.

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