Sometimes I think my life has a dreamlike quality to it - or maybe living in New York City helps.  I received an email from Konrad Feldman, founder of a new audience demographics service called Quantcast, that I posted about earlier, who was in town for Advertising week, and we met this morning at Morgans for a hastly arranged breakfast. BTW, it’s thanks to MarketingShift that I know about Quantcast at all - MarketingShift makes a lot of good calls and I read it every day.

Getting back to my story: for many years, I had no idea that there was a hotel/bed and breakfast, very elite, very homey, located on 37th and Madison.  It was great meeting Konrad Feldman and Paul Sutter of Quantcast this morning both to get some news about their free analytics service AND to give the feedback as personal user.

What caught Konrad’s eye was my post on Banksy’s Demographics - Banksy’s Demographics and Angelina Jolie’s 400K Picnic purchase - you remember the guy - the artist who painted an elephant pink in the LA warehouse show- Banksy also sold Angelina Jolie 400,000 dollars worth of art this month; as if that were not enough, Banksy also did a prank/art statement with Paris Hilton’s new music album in London in early September ( Banksy’s art buzz and Angelina Jolie’s 400K purchase) ……Banksy is all over the place and I used Quantcast to figure out who Banksy’s audience was made up of.

When I met Konrad Feldman this morning - he was ready to elaborate on Banksy - and had something prepared to show me - advanced features that are not released yet - such as the ability to show where an audience is going from a website that is being analyzed by Quantcast!  Quite impressive.  

Quantcast has about 10 people working for it, a bunch of computer scientists, private equity, as I understand it - they are not charging right now for any service you can get at from their site.  In fact, their plans are to make money by helping advertisers find the right sites to advertise on.  At this point I was not able to really nail down their business plan but it sounded to me like Quancast is company that is doing something very interesting and flying under the radar - at least until now.

What I like about Quantcast is the ability to put in any URL and get an audience measurement out of it.  In fact, my own site, Webmetricsguru, becomes an search result, once searched on using the Quantcast tool … .Intersting indeed!  Look at the third result (for me today) in Google

Quantcast profile for webmetricsguru.com

We have sparse data about webmetricsguru.com, so these are rough … Retrieved from "http://www.quantcast.com/wiki/index.php/Special:Domainprofile" … www.quantcast.com/webmetricsguru.com - 31k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

So the fact I searched on Quantcast is captured by a Search Engine … I wonder how many other records there are of searches like this - urls like this?

I can see that entrepreneur.com, medicinenet.com, gap.com, wwe.com. military.com, and so on, captured in Google’s search results.  No big deal, everything is public here and free and that’s what so great about it.

The audience profiling is great too…it’s still a work in progress and I pointed out some issues I had with some of the numbers that were being spit out - I won’t go over that here because the point is - this is a beta service that’s still being worked on - it is not the final product yet and a new set of features are being planned as I speak.

I made a couple of suggestions to Konrad Feldman and Paul Sutter (thanks’ for Breakfast at Morgan’s, btw) about Quantcast - 1) look into audience measurements for Online Videos (that’s the hottest medium now) and look to parter with Web Analytics firms that want to include your Audience data with their Web Analytics.   Web Analytics is about precision - esp the more expensive packages and putting the data into the analytics is probably better than trying to overlay it later.  For example, if your looking at Unique visitors to a promotion - it’s better to tie THOSE unique visitors in the Web Analytics software to an audience than look at a site and say, the audience is made up of this many males vs this many females.  The more precise you get, the better it is for Web Analytics.

Also, while Quantcast does not see itself as HitWise’s competitor - I do (and a much more reasonablly priced one, by the way) because there are some overlaps in what Quantcast provides that HitWise provides - but there are a lot of differences too.

Quantcast is a company to watch, to subscribe to their blog and to give feedback to as they want feedback.  One suggestion, a daring one - is to partner with Performancing to supply Audience measurement for Blogs.   Peformancing…are you listening?

Couple of other things - Quantcast has built a "map" of the internet so that "map" will figure into the next series of improvements and the audience data is profile based, but they don’t say yet how big their profile panel is.  Quantcast can tell you how accurate they think their assesment of your audience is and that is published when you request information about a url.

Also, the "Head of Household" data that is presented now should be used with the "Have Childredn ages 6-17"; the information is presented but the relationship does not seem to be as clear as it needs so I’m bringing it up here.

Also the Head of Household information for "no college" needs some work still - but like everything else - Quantcast is a work in progress and I would keep an eye on this company both for advertising and innovation.   I think Quantcast needs to also consider coming up with a high end offering for Fortune 500 companies - something more robost and precise - in otherwords, start branching out to other audiences besises the small advertisers.