Does anyone really believe Web stats sites any more? Last week, I posted a quick write-up of some negative data about KillerStartups that David Knight at The Knight Knetwork had noticed. The KillerStartups marketing team, went on the defensive, both in the comments below the Knight post as well as via email. The evidence that Knight's analysis was wrong? Quantcast.

To be fair, Quantcast does break out the global vs. U.S. numbers for KillerStartups, and seems to update frequently, something that Alexa fails to do on a regular basis and the free version of Compete does only once per month, at month-end. Still, the metrics behind Web stats have variables which can throw off measurement. Last fall, Jeremy Schoemaker, better known in Web marketing circles as Shoemoney, noted that even running the Quantcast widget on his site, the stats were so far off as to be completely unusable. Others have reported similar discrepancies for their sites across the board, with no service showing the same numbers as raw logs generated by stats trackers running directly on the service.

Any Web administrator knows how off numbers can be depending on how the software tracking them is configured. Are images tracked separately as pageviews? Does the "unique visitors" number include sites hitting yours for those same graphics? Are spiders separated out or are they included in stats?

But considering the CPM model of content monetization, companies live and die by how they are viewed. Web stats need a standardized metric. I'm a firm believer that nothing counts other than raw server logs. Web stats services are nothing more than an overview of trends, and the trends (even on Quantcast) show a steep drop in KillerStartups' traffic, no matter which service you use to measure it. Whether Crunchbase plays a part in that drop or not, and whether the site is rebounding or not remains to be seen, but picking and choosing the best of the worst in traffic monitoring is a game everyone seems to be playing.

Alexa stats for KillerStartups vs. Crunchbase:

Compete stats for KillerStartups vs. CrunchBase:

Google Trends stats for KillerStartups vs. Crunchbase:

Quantcast stats for KillerStartups vs. CrunchBase:

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