Competitive Website Metrics are Broken: A Twitter Study

• rant
• twitter

The amount of discussion that has gone on projecting twitter’s demise based on “stalled growth” is very interesting. I think this particular example demonstrates very well that current competitive analysis techniques used for web business are broken and failing to deliver the information genuinely needed.

I believe the web is currently informationally, functionally and economically constrained from further evolution.

We currently believe that a website’s traffic volumes are an accurate measure of success – and thus an accurate reflection of monetization potential. The message of a post that was published on Mashable yesterday suggests that competitive analysis tools such as Quantcast and Compete offer an accurate measurement of the success of a web entity. Although some possible explanations are offered for Twitter’s waning usage, that is the general tone. I am pleased to see the Twitter CEO challenged the claims, although I’m sure his claims have been met with a healthy dose of skepticism (which is probably fair).

Do we all really think that Twitter’s website traffic is a wholly accurate measure? I do use the Twitter web client (and I expect to be ridiculed for this), thus contributing to the web traffic but I also use Tweetie on the iPhone too – and the likes of Quantcast and Compete have zero visibility of that. So I really don’t know how it is truly possible, even in this case when we aren’t attempting to compare Twitter with another site, purely trending its own traffic volumes.

The Web with a different ego?
My personal opinion is that Twitter represents a different kind of “web ego”. Twitter’s growth and success is generally associated with concepts of immediacy and openness. Through open APIs developers around the world have taken a very simple concept and created a multitude of applications, and each of these apps has assisted in growing Twitter as a web presence and brand. Do you think that Quantcast and Compete have visibility of the traffic that each of these applications is pushing into Twitter? I don’t think so. The likes of Facebook and friends would have gladly stayed closed entities; representing the old “web ego”, if it hadn’t been for Twitter coming along and mixing it up a little. Yes Facebook is an amazingly successful web platform, and it deserves some respect, but its business model (ye olde advertising) is very much tied to site visitors interacting on the actual facebook site.

I guess some would say: “At least facebook has a business model”. I think that is fair comment. Without doubt Twitter’s biggest challenge is how to continue to grow and actually start to show some return on investment to those companies that have helped them grow to this point. I hope they solve that one though, because if the next generation of web sites/apps/services can be freed from single-dimensional measures of success and comparison, I think we will see some really interesting things happen.

Update:
ReadWriteWeb has published an article that talks to Twitter’s actual growth (in terms of tweet volume). I think that article nicely illustrates why services like Compete can’t really now do what they set out to do with websites – even though RWW guys don’t talk about difficulty with tracking, when you refer back to the Mashable post you can definitely sense the contradiction.