Compete.com and HitWise.com, more and more, look like competitors - at least, in how findings from these two analytics services are being broadcast out and what they're representing.

The latest post from Compete has YouTube and MySpace compared for visitor loyalty, time spent on site - stuff that like.

"While MySpace has been around longer and has had more time to build its member base, it is also much more engaging with 82% of visitors conducting member activities vs. 25% for YouTube."

But it's not a fair comparison as people can do a lot more on MySpace.com than they do on YouTube; besides, how are streaming videos that are embedded in zillions of pages counted by Compete?  

I don't think they are - nor can they be using the technology they're using.  No one actually knows all the details of the streaming videos - which are a measure of engagement for YouTube.  While YouTube does capture how many times each clip is viewed - it probably does not know everywhere those clips are being seen - and that's a lot of real estate.  

In fact, it's a good bet that Google will use YouTube's traffic for audience measurements by hooking in an upgraded version of Google Analytics (or a variant of it) to produce real audience demographics per clip/video steam.

Getting back to Compete vs. HitWise.  Look at HitWise's post comparing YouTube and MySpace published August 16th, 2006 and compare it to Compete.com's post today.

The main difference between the two services, Compete being totally free, and HitWise (if you look at these two posts) is HitWise can categorize traffic while Compete does not.   But if Compete does that - HitWise will lose one of it's strong points.