Compete.com keeps getting better and better – did you know Compete Now Offers Audience Insights! You can get the information on most of the larger sites but not on very small websites where there isn’t enough information.  You can also get Audience breakdowns by demographics according to the Compete.com blog:

..Compete Audience Profiles are available to anyone with a free MyCompete account on compete.com. See an example of some of the attributes you’ll see when using Compete Audience Profiles below.

However, in order to get Audience Profile data to show up each website that wants it must claim ownership and place a JavaScript sending data to Compete.com so it can capture this information -and it just might be worth doing and seems to overlap some of what Quantcast does by collecting much of the same information.

You can read about the details in the Compete Now Offers Audience Insights! post but rather than repeat the same information they offered, I’m going to use Compete to look at something different, like proving a Social Media casestudy works or not – not sure the information is granular enough though.

But the Demographics and Age-Income information is good enough to tell us something about Twitter

The early adopters who used Twitter had more money – but as time has gone on, Twitter is going mainstream and this chart above shows it (though the ages of Twitter users didn’t change much over the last two years).

I generally use tools like Compete to confirm or deny assumptions or hypothesis that I have.    If it’s just about driving attention to a site, the daily attention and daily time spent are better – but if your looking to see how changes you have made have broadly changed your audience, Compete is you friend – and a better friend than Comscore – which is much, much more expensive – but doesn’t offer much more in this respect.

If Compete were to offer their Industry and Behavioral profiles to everyone AND cover the entire world, they’d have, more or less, the same thing as Comscore MyMetrix – but they would need a lot more granularity.

It just goes to show that the bar keeps getting higher – and Comscore and Nielsen ought to be happy they have companies like Compete and Quantcast to keep them innovating and getting better – because if they didn’t,  there would not be much value in Comscore or Nielsen, which is more focused on paid advertising, anyway.

But, as I wrote a few years ago, the value of all these tools, Compete, Quantcast, Comscore, Nielsen, etc, is to foster conversations in a safe way between brands and competitors – they should not be taken as absolute truths – more as trending tools for insight.

Anyhow, Great job for Compete – they continue to raise the bar – and I’m looking forward to the next release which I understand was going to be next month.