Like many entrepreneurs, I check the compete.com #s for my Web sites. I've found that they are way off for relatively low traffic sites. Take my recently launched startup, Duck Duck Go.
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The compete stats for Duck Duck Go show about 14K unique visitors in Sep. and then 3.1K in Oct. In reality (according to awstats), the real #s were 8.3K in Sep. and then 6.2K in Oct.
To most people in the know about this stuff, I suppose this isn't a big shocker. Me included. However, I haven't looked at this in a while, and I was still somewhat surprised how far off it was.
Granted, it must be difficult to extrapolate on the low end. And this case may be even more difficult. I launched Duck Duck Go on Sep. 25 on Hacker News, and that site and Reddit generated most of the traffic in Sep. over those last few days.
So maybe that audience has more compete toolbars installed than then the Oct. cohort or something. I don't know. But I do know it is way off. It will be interesting to see if it gets better at higher traffic. Of course to test that theory, I'd have to get some higher traffic!
I guess I am annoyed about it because I think people evaluating your company do look at these things. I know I do. For instance, it's right there front and center on our crunchbase page. And the immediate effect I think people get from looking at that is that we kind of suck. But if the #s were accurate, perhaps they wouldn't get that immediate first impression.
