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Services that compare website traffic are important to the industry because they provide context for how a site is faring. However, many sites claim these measurement services have incorrect data for them (here’s some sample criticism), and that’s not helped by the fact that all of the services seem to have different data.

You likely know the big players: Alexa and Compete. Then there are the premium services: Hitwise and comScore.

Now a new cowboy is riding into town — and he’s arguably the best gunslinger in the Wild West: Google.

Google has launched a new feature for its Trends service that lets you compare websites, according to Search Engine Land. You can now get a graphical representation of how a site is doing in terms of unique visitors versus other sites.

Google’s service gathers its numbers a bit differently than other traffic comparison sites. It looks at the search volume for a site, anonymous Google Analytics statistics and “other third-party market research,” which again, seems a bit vague for a site trying to put out credible data.

The service offers other information as well. It will show the popular regions for particular domains, which other sites people have visited and what search terms people have used in order to get to that site.

It will take a bit of time and some testing to know just how accurate Google’s entry into the site- comparison world is, but Google usually has good data, and this field really needs a clear authority.

Below you can see a chart comparing Facebook and MySpace. You’ll notice that Facebook passed MySpace sometime in late 2007 according to Google Trends.

comScore has just released its April analysis of online video consumption in the United States and once again, the market is expanding and Google’s dominance continues to grow right along with it.

The numbers below make this clear:

In March, Americans watched 9.8 billion videos, down from a high of 10.1 billion in December of 2007. (coverage)  Google’s properties, YouTube and Google Video (almost entirely YouTube), accounted for approximately 3.63 billion, or 34.3%, of those views, with Fox Interactive Media (led by MySpace) far behind in second place, with around 584 million, or 6%.

In April, video intake regained its momentum. Americans watched 11 billion online videos and Google had 37.9% of them. Fox dropped to 557 million, or 5.1%. Yahoo! and Microsoft were next on the list, with around 352 million (3.2%) and 268 million (2.4%) respectively.

Overall, almost 3/4ths of Americans with Internet access are now consuming online video, spending an average of 228 minutes doing so per month. One small but fascinating statistic is that the average duration of an individual online video was 2.8 minutes, suggesting that attention span shrinkage is not at all limited to the written word.

Web measurement company comScore just announced it has acquired mobile metrics startup M:Metrics. ComScore is already one of the best-known companies for measuring web traffic from PCs, and the deal signals its intention to move into the mobile market by combining its tools with M:Metrics’. The combined data will provide a comprehensive look at combined Internet traffic from PCs and mobile devices.

We reported yesterday that M:Metrics would be acquired by “a large company with international operations”, and we said the Seattle-based startup was asking for between $50 and $80 million. It turns out comScore agreed to pay $44.5 million cash and issue 50,000 options for purchase of comScore shares to unvested M:Metrics options holders.

As we noted, the deal — which follows The Nielsen Company’s acquisition of mobile research company Telephia last August — is all about mobile advertising, a field where much of the traffic data is conflicting and unreliable. If M:Metrics can add reliable mobile numbers to the mix, Reston, Va.-based comScore will come even closer to domination of the traffic data market.

M:Metrics co-founders Will Hodgman and Seamus McAteer are joining comScore management.

The past two decades have seen some great second acts in business – people or companies that were up so high, then fell so low to the point of possible extinction, only to come roaring back to the top again. Donald Trump and Apple are two that immediately spring to mind. Soon, we may have to include another company on that list: AOL.

Traffic to its web properties has grown over 15 percent in the past year. The first quarter of this year saw 56.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore. This, combined with news earlier this month that AOL’s Platform A is now the top ad network, beating out competing efforts from Yahoo and Google, are very good signs for the company.

It’s not all good news yet, as Time Warner is expected to announce a relatively weak quarter for AOL when it reports earnings next week, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the pieces may be in place now for a serious comeback down the road.

This turnaround has been a long time in the making. AOL was arguably at its peak when it bought media giant Time Warner in 2000 for $147 billion. (For some perspective of just how big this deal was, remember that Microsoft’s current bid for Yahoo is $44.6 billion.) From there, things went south pretty quickly for AOL.

The problem was, it was in the dial-up web portal business, which was the only way millions of people could access the Internet at the time. When broadband connections started to pop up,  AOL’s core business became increasingly worthless. But AOL failed to recognize this trend and adapt to it in time. In fact, it took the company until 2006 to formally decide it would shift from a paid web portal to a free one.

AOL realized that content was king and that it had quite a few properties that were leading the way in their respective fields thanks to its purchase of the blog network, Weblogs Inc., in 2005. The next step was realizing that if it had all this content, why pay someone else to set up the ads for it. And, with that in mind, the company launched Platform A last year.

AOL then bought social network Bebo in March of this year and it’s kept the ball rolling with its recent purchase of blogging search and relevancy engine, Sphere.

There is also the Yahoo wild card to consider as well. While most people wrote off the idea of an AOL/Yahoo combination as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo, perhaps such a partnership would not be such a bad idea. AOL/Yahoo could make for a very powerful online ad/content network.

AOL is continuing to expand its web properties, rolling out new sites at a rapid pace this year. We’ve questioned this apparent strategy of quantity over quality, but perhaps it could just work. Rather than having all its chips in one basket, as it arguably did in the 1990s with the dial-up portal business, AOL now has its chips in multiple places, and the strategy appears, at least for now, to be paying off.

When a stock is trading over $400 a share, you might think it would be impossible for its price to rise over 20 percent in one day — you’d be wrong.

Following yesterday’s first quarter report in which Google blew right past Wall Street and comScore’s (more on that in a bit) expectations (our coverage), the company is surging. The stock closed yesterday at $449.54, and this morning – at the time of this writing — it’s at $546.81, an increase of over 21 percent.

Unless there is a sell-off at the end of the day (perhaps tempting, given where the stock was just yesterday), this will be the largest one-day stock gain in Google’s relatively brief but impressive existence. The previous best day for the stock was all the way back in October of 2004 when the stock jumped over 15 percent, according to CNET. Back then the stock was “only” in the mid $100-a-share range. Today’s surge is simply much more impressive.

ComScore, the Internet marketing research company, is not fairing as well as Google. One of the main catalysts for Google’s rise today was comScore’s report from a few days ago that suggested the company’s paid-click growth in the U.S. would be a weak 1.8 percent (our coverage). The actual global number was 20 percent, with 10 percent in the U.S. market.

While Google’s stock was rising yesterday in after-hours trading, comScore’s was plummeting, falling 8 percent. It has bounced back today during regular trading (down only 2 percent), but there is no question that comScore’s reputation has taken a hit. People are going to be second-guessing its numbers from now on. That is probably a good thing. It can be misleading to only follow one company’s numbers and base decisions on that — something we’ve alluded to multiple times (here, here, here and here).

Silicon Alley Insider feels comScore is getting a bad rap today. They argue that it did, after all, help alert analysts to Google’s paid-click deceleration, which in turn led analysts to cut expectations and paved the way for Google to beat the Street. That’s all well and good, but the point of these reports is still to be right, no? Not simply be “directionally” correct and temper expectations. The fact is that comScore was off — significantly off.

User behavior is surprisingly diverse when it comes to watching online videos, a recent study by Comscore and Media Contacts has found. The data provides a more granular perspective on the surge of people going to online video sites, instead of watching television.

The 20 percent of viewers who watched video the most averaged 841 minutes of viewing per month. The next 30 percent averaged 77 minutes. The other half of the population watched just six minutes.

These top 20-percenters also generally spent more time on foreign-language sites, such as Chinese-language video sites Youku.com and Todou.com.

The middle 30 percent, meanwhile, favored online video content on sites run by major broadcasters, including CBS TV Local, ABC Daytime, and others — not YouTube. Notably, a separate study by Nielsen shows that the majority of people view online videos on broadcaster’s sites are female. While Comscore-Media Contacts study didn’t address gender, one can guess through putting these pieces together that the middle 30 percent in its study tend to be female.

Lastly, the 50 percent of people who only watch a few minutes of online video per month are serious TV watchers. Out of this group, 46 percent indicated they watch more than 13 hours of TV per week. Unsurprisingly, a lower percentage of the other two categories watched as much TV. Of the middle group, only 39 percent watched as much TV and among the top 20 percent, only 30 percent watched as much TV.

YouTube was the top video site for all three groups in the study, reaching 54 percent of all video viewers.

It is in this context that YouTube is introducing a range of new features, designed in part to position itself even more as the online alternative to television.

The company is going to launch a series of branded videos featuring “living legends,” starting with concert videos from The Rolling Stones. Advertisers trying to reach YouTube users will also be getting more data on users and videos, such as the geographical locations of viewers. For users, the company will launch video recommendations based on your viewing preferences, better video-editing tools, and YouTube videos that can be displayed on places like really big TVs — more here.

Updated

More and more publishers and retailers rely on so-called “widgets,” little boxes placed on other web sites, to deliver their news, entertainment and product advertisements.

So measuring Web traffic to those widgets is important for deciding what content to deliver, and what sites to deliver it on. A number of companies now offer widget traffic measurement tools, with Quantcast being the latest.

Here’s a summary of some of the main players in this nascent but increasingly important field:

Quantcast – This relatively new San Francisco company monitors traffic to Internet sites. Today, it adds a video and widget measurement service, also free. It is still a test version and publishers include Slide, PictureTrail, RockYou, MetaCafe and MochiMedia. It reports on traffic to all Flash-based media, including online games and downloaded desktop widgets. The service reports a widget’s “reach,” the number of times a video has been “played” or that widget has been clicked on, and the categories chosen (a publisher can tag a widget or video as a “game” or “comedy,” for example). It will also report things such as which users clicked on the widget most often (frequency), and the demographics of these users, based on other information Quantcast collects. It provides this information in a pie chart. To use it, you have to register here www.quantcast.com/quantified-publisher.jsp, and more info is here www.quantcast.com/quantified-video.jsp. See chart below.

Clearspring – The company offers traffic analytics for publishers like Time, NBC, Universal and Maxim – which together now have more than 4.2 billion widget views. Last month, the company began letting developers write, distribute and tracking widgets through Clearspring. Like other offerings, it provides a dashboard, and tracks things like a widget’s source domain, number of visits and geography of visitor. Clearstone, like Quantcast, is hands-off on the widget creation process. You’ll need a third-party developer to build a widget if you want one built.

WidgetBox – This company provides a “wrapper” to widget developers so that they can track the widgets. Again, you’ll need to build the widget yourself.

Musestorm -– The company distributes widgets for both the Web and the desktop. Notably, though, this company goes a step further. Other companies put a “wrapper” around the widget and then track that widget. However, they can’t track activity of content within the widget. Musestorm lets you do that -– for example letting you know how many times a video within the widget has been played, and how users switch between surrounding audio and text. Quantcast, Widgetbox and Clearspring don’t offer that. Musestorm also lets you update widget content, adding and removing items, and so lets you track performance of variable kinds of content. Musestorm has a new release coming this summer containing other features.

Update: Comment below mention other providers, Comscore (see here) and Yourminis.

It sucks when your Web site’s traffic isn’t being measured correctly.

It also sucks when you’re trying to measure the significance of someone else’s site, and are getting conflicting signals.

Here’s what we’ve learned over the past few days, after our initial piece on the problems of Alexa, Quantcast and Compete, all sites that independently verify how much traffic a site is getting.

We’ve learned that if a measuring company doesn’t have a tracking pixel directly on the Web site it is tracking, the numbers are extremely unreliable.

This may be nothing new for insiders, but the public data provided by Alexa, Quantcast and Compete can be misleading for the rest of us, because they purport to be accurate. In fact, that data is almost all collected from the surfing patterns of a very small sample of people. Those people are not going to be surfing certain niche sites as much as the general population.

Take the example of Streetfire, a very popular video site for car enthusiasts. Until our initial post, co-founder Adam Bruce was somewhat content with Google analytics, which showed his site had three million unique visitors a month (he let us login to his Google account to confirm). This matched information of his server logs, which Google also manages, and it was compatible with the ad server tracker from Adjuggler. Of course, this was all internal information.

Outsiders had access to Alexa (see its Streetfire rankings), a free site measuring tool, but Bruce believes most people recognize Alexa’s shortcomings, so he isn’t taking Alexa too seriously. Then along came two more sites, Quantcast and Compete, saying they can do a better job than Alexa. After we pointed to them in our post, Bruce checked them, but he found they were both showing his traffic at about an eighth to a twelfth of his internal numbes. Alarmed, and filled with renewed doubt about the reliability of his internal numbers (because server logs can be unreliable too, as can Google Analytics), he called up Compete and Quantcast to find out more.

Notably, both companies cooperated. Quantcast responded by offering him a tracking pixel, to be put directly on his site. This opened Quantcast’s eyes: It saw Streetfire’s traffic was indeed much higher than it had estimated, and told Bruce it will readjust its numbers after a full month’s reading. Compete, however said it couldn’t deliver a tracking pixel — in part, it said, because Nielsen/Netratings owned patents on this sort of thing, and that Quantcast can get away with it because it is too small to sue. (Although, we’re not certain whether Netratings really does have a patent on this).

To be fair, Compete does have impressive data: It says it gets data from the surfing habits of two million people, which is more than comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen and Alexa. It takes extensive measures to ensure data is diverse — gathering it from multiple Internet and application service providers, panels and its own toolbar — all this is more than can be said for the others. Compete has an impressive list of testimonials, but read through the list — most of those people aren’t experts, and even if they are, our hunch is that they wrote positively about Compete, just like we did initially, because it looked so much better than what Alexa was offering.

All these strengths of Compete, however, serve to underscore our point. If it really has such a industry-leading sampling, why did it go so horribly wrong with Streetfire? We called up Compete, and asked. We talked with product manager Jay Meattle, and Stephen DiMarco, who is in charge of “emerging markets.” They said they went back to their panel sampling and studied why a video site like Streetfire would be undercounted. Their analysis found video-oriented sites like Streetfire were being undercounted by a factor of four. Adjusting their numbers, that put Streetfire’s monthly uniques back up to 1 million or so, but not at the 3 million the other trackers were showing. In other words, it is still undercounting — and it came only after Streetfire requested a revision.

This is particularly worrying because Streetfire is a major site. If a car enthusiast site of 3 million uniques is being undercounted by the biggest objective panel out there, then well, the rest of us little chickens are hosed. The Compete guys told us they are more interested in serving general consumer sites (their main customers), and don’t really care about niche sites like say, VentureBeat ;). “Our clients are big consumer marketers,” they said. Fair enough. They take Streetfire seriously, they said, because it is a big site. But that also leaves us with this hunch: Most consumer sites are overcounted by Compete. Both may have an interest in that being the case.

Meanwhile, Adam Bruce, of Streetfire, is relieved because Quantcast’s tracker, at least, vindicated him. He can still trust his internal numbers. Bruce’s conclusion: Quantcast offers the best of both worlds. It offers you all the third-party data it can get (see screenshot at bottom; it shows gender, geographic and other data that Bruce says coincides with his sense of his readers), but if you ask it to, it will put a tracker on your site, to verify. Now, not all sites will allow Quantcast do to this. But its livelihood is on the line, like Streetfire’s small team’s is, it makes sense.

Conclusion: When you go to Quantcast for data on a site, be sure it has a tracking pixel on the site before drawing conclusions.

Finally, a note on Site Meter. Bruce said that company’s stats make sense since they are in line with his other sources, though Site Meter doesn’t report unique visitors, just visits.