The Top Web Sites of Southwest Texas

January 18, 2008
By Joe Hyde
Special to LIVE!

Using surveys and reporting on the findings of convenience samples to measure audience in various media has become a way of life over the past 50 years.

They better be telling the truth: Bogus statistics and bloated boasts of market share by anyone are about to be a thing of the past if Internet startup Quantcast—a new media measurement service that lets advertisers view audience reports on millions of websites—continues to grow the way it has been. Its concept is to provide universal transparency to advertisers and publishers about the true readership of individual Web sites. Eventually, the company expects to be able to measure more than just the Web, as television and radio give way to on-demand video and audio delivered via packet-based networks.

Quantcast uses a two-pronged approach to measure Web site traffic. Publishers can volunteer to participate by placing invisible JavaScript tags, computer code, on their Web pages. Or, if publishers aren’t participating, Quantcast has what they call a “panel” of Internet users, numbering over one million users, from whom they cull statistics on millions of Web domains. The data is published for the entire world to view on their Web site, www.quantcast.com. And it doesn’t cost advertisers or publishers a thing.

Quantcast allows advertisers to view audience reports on millions of Web sites and it allows publishers, with even the smallest of sites, to demonstrate the size and value of their audiences using an “apples to apples” comparison method (HOW?), using the same statistical methods across all Web sites it measures.

“The media world is moving more and more toward [quantifiable] data,” Quantcast chief marketing officer Adam Gerber says. Gerber should know. He spent the last 15 years prior to Quantcast in the field of media buying and planning. He didn’t just watch the digital revolution in media. He lived and worked it.

Gerber says he recognized the trend toward more accountability in media measurement and saw the Quantcast service as a means to tailoring advertising purchases to particular or niche audiences.

Top Web Sites in Southwest Texas
Web Site	Unique Visitors
swtexaslive.com	10624
uvaldeleadernews.com	7988
delrionewsherald.com	7681
swtjc.net	7673
cityofdelrio.com	6592
drchamber.com	4474
sfdr-cisd.org	2531
rgc.sulross.edu	2279
cityofeaglepass.com	1627
eaglepasstexas.com	1627
mrgdc.org	1059
cadenarealty.com	911
epalumni.com	813
remaxdelriotx.com	813
ramadainndelrio.com	762
laughlin.af.mil	515
thenewsgramonline.hdnweb.com	406
uvaldetx.com	406
delriorealestate.com	406
kdlk.com	406
tcnewsleader.com	404
sonoratx.net	400
Ranked by unique visitors culled from Quantcast.com on 1/16/08. Since Quantcast continuously updates their statistics, these numbers will vary continuously.

Quantifying Every Audience and Audience Member

Some pieces of the puzzle are yet to be in place. One piece is upgrading delivery platforms for all media. Gerber sees everything going completely digital. Then everyone—not just a representative sample—can be measured by the trail they leave behind via their “data events,” or the series of events that result from a person’s “movements” on and uses of a particular site.

“In television, when NBC is selling ads, they sell 30-seond commercials in, say, ‘Deal or No Deal,’ and everyone watching that program will view the same message,” Gerber says. “In the future, NBC will be able to sell a sliver [of that audience] to one advertiser and another sliver to a second advertiser, and so on, all in the same 30 second spot” he says. “A lot of what is going on today on the Web will be in all media soon.”

The second piece of the puzzle is to develop and maintain a platform that provides measurement and accountability of all that data allowing media planners to select the correct audiences. That is what Quantcast is doing.

Gerber says that Quantcast excels in gathering and reporting accurate data on small, privately owned and non-conglomerate sites. These small sites are a giant opportunity for audiences and advertisers that, until now, have been overshadowed by huge sites like Google and Yahoo. “We are a fantastic resource for marketers to evaluate and understand the audiences of smaller sites,” Gerber says.

“This creates the notion of buying online media differently,” he says. “Right now, online media buyers generally buy on an impression basis. They don’t buy audience. For example, how can you buy ‘men, 18-34 years-old'?" By using Quantcast data, buyers can now select inventory in segments, empowered by demographic and lifestyle information provided, as opposed to buying blind banner ad impressions. “Quantcast provides visibility and addressability of the Web audience,” Gerber says.

How will Quantcast make money?

Gerber promises that within the next six months, his company will be rolling out higher-end services for a fee. “We’re developing an enhanced set of services that will present data in an even more [nuanced] way,” Gerber says. That data will be used by large advertisers and Quantcast is already working with some of the larger online advertising networks.

“But the more basic data service, the current product we offer right now, will always be free,” he says.

Quantcast claims 22,000 participating publishers (up from zero on Sept. 16, 2006) for whom the company is collecting billions of data records per week. Quantcast data collection is scalable across over 20,000 global locations via their Akamai network. “We are very focused on insuring the Quantcast tag has the least impact possible on publisher Web site speeds,” Gerber says.

Some of the more famous Web sites currently “quantified” by Quantcast include Fox, CBS, WordPress, Hi5, Slide, IDG Communications, Gawker Media, Image Shack, Smugmug, and Metacafe. Locally, sanangelolive.com and KLST-TV’s conchovalleyhomepage.com use the Quantcast service.

Some things we’ve learned about the Southwest Texas LIVE! audience using Quantcast data:

1. We attract more women than men

2. We are popular among the 25-34-years-old age group as well as the 55+ crowd.

3. We attract those with an average household income

4. More Hispanics than Anglos read us, when compared to national averages

4. More of our readers have a college degree than not, and a ton of our readers have gone to grad school (thanks, Bill!)

5. Our readers are more likely to not have children 6-17 years old in the household

6. We attract 10,000 unique visitors per month