Compete.com – easy look at competitors

Competitor Watch: One of the nice things about the web is its ability to equalize the playing field. You certainly can learn a lot about your competitors online.

Now, you won’t learn a ton on the Compete.com site unless you sign up for a premium level option, but you can still take a fun look at competitors, their site traffic, how they stack up against you or someone else in your industry.

This chart below shows a quick look I took at AllBusiness.com and its growth. I sure am glad that I’ve joined AllBusiness.com as an Advisor! I like being part of an upwardly mobile group.

The power in the Compete.com service is in the premium levels where you can find out about keywords, traffic, and more on sites you watch regularly. Pro level starts at $199.00 a month. Thankfully, they have cool tools for free (as you’ll find right at the top of the site home page), but just not as powerful, of course.

I’m installing the Firefox add-on called the “ Compete Site Profile Extension”

From their website: “It allows you to track how any and every web site in the world is performing from your browser. Designed for marketers and web enthusiasts, this browser companion provides users with extensive information about web sites - instantly find out how popular a web site is, its rank, and how fast it is growing.”

Pretty cool.

The Search Analytics button will let you get the five most popular keywords for a top-level domain. You can pull this sort of info together elsewhere, but if you’re into search engine optimization or search engine marketing this is a useful service.

Lastly, on Compete.com’s blog – they had a look at traffic to top sites. The numbers were different than I expected. You can go to this chart or just these stats here. This was done in 2007, but I don’t think it would be much different now.

Key Observations:

• Only 20 domains capture a whopping 39% of all our time spent online.
• Only 2.1% of our time is spent on Google.com (includes all sub-domains).
• This surprised me somewhat, given how much I *think* I use Google everyday. I still think I use Google quite a bit, but now realize I don’t spend much time on the site itself. Google is NOT a portal with loads of content. Gmail and Google News are the only services that I spend considerable time on. Search, Maps, etc are quick look-up utilities, as they should be.
• Even if one adds time spent on YouTube.com (#12) to Google.com’s (#5) tally — it still only adds up to 2.7%, and is well below time spent on Ebay.com (#4).
• MySpace (#1) is miles ahead of Yahoo! (#2), however Yahoo! impresses. Yahoo holds a significant lead over Google YouTube.com, MSN Live.com and AOL AIM.com. Yahoo simply needs to merge with MSN to take #1 (hint hint)
• The presence of Adultfriendfinder.com on this list is surprising, but hey, everyone needs a friend, or two!

Now I haven’t checked into it thoroughly yet, but I’ve seen some posts by Ryan Spoon with some good input on the accuracy of Compete versus other services. Mr. Spoon appears to have some good commentary worth a read. I'll write on that later.

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