Maintaining Server Privacy

August 27, 2009 4:27 PM

If you do a search for my company’s website on Google, one of the top hits is a page at Quantcast.com that purports to display “visitor statistics” for our domain. These statistics are wildly inaccurate by orders of magnitude and make it look as though our site gets only a tiny percentage as many visitors as it actually does. What’s more, there are all kinds of demographic charts and info, purportedly about our site, that don’t seem to have any connection to reality whatsoever. How do I get them to stop misrepresenting us?

In their FAQs, Quantcast answers the question “how do I remove my site from Quantcast’s listing?” with “We do not remove sites from our listing.” They propose that one join their Quantcast Publisher program, but this program forces you to give them your actual server stats, which they will use and publish whether you like it or not.

I’m galled that there seem to be only two choices:

a.) putting up with a page of highly visible misinformation about my company that causes us actual financial harm; and

b.) signing up for some company’s service and giving them access to our server stats.

Surely there's a third choice? My question is this:
Do you think there’s any way to word a letter to a company like this to get them to remove our site from their listing?

(BTW, I know there are a couple of other companies, like Alexa, that do this kind of thing, but they don’t bother me because their stats are vague and don't pretend to be accurate. It's the false "accurate" picture that I can't get over.)

posted by dacoit to technology (17 comments total)

Well, their typical page does have the disclaimer "SITE NOT QUANTIFIED. DATA IS ESTIMATED" on the ones I checked out [ex.]. I'm not sure you have a lot of leeway here: this is free speech.

The best strategy would probably be to find out why you're getting such poor links on your google search results, and address that. Ultimately, you may also want to address why you're concerned with your statistics at all. Do your customers care?
posted by dhartung at 4:58 PM on August 27

I doubt there's anything you can do about it. Grin and bear it.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:59 PM on August 27

dacoit: Do you think there’s any way to word a letter to a company like this to get them to remove our site from their listing?

Yes. The letter should be worded on letter head from a legal firm.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:05 PM on August 27 [3 favorites]

The best strategy would probably be to find out why you're getting such poor links on your google search results, and address that

Yes, this. And don't bother with shady SEO firms - just start a company blog, or put out a few press releases that have links back to your site. The search engines will pick up on them soon enough.
posted by chrisamiller at 5:06 PM on August 27

Well, if it helps.. I've never heard of Quantcast but I've definitely used Alexa. Maybe they know this will bother people and push them to want to buy into their service(s).

.. so I guess the question is, can a company legally misrepresent information about you publicly in order to make a sale? Yikes.
posted by june made him a gemini at 5:08 PM on August 27

Yes, our customers definitely care. They're new media professionals purchasing thousands of ad listings on our site. And yes, free speech, but it's like this:

Imagine some guy comes and stands in front of your house, holding a sign saying "dhartung makes $20K a year." You might say to him, "First of all why are you standing in front of my house? And why are you professing to know anything about me and then saying things that aren't true? I make way more than $20K a year, for one thing." "Great!" the guy says. "Sign up with me, let me look at your tax records, and I'll hold up a sign saying how much you really make."

If you're like most people, your reaction to this guy is going to be "What I make is none of your business! Get off my lawn and take that sign with you!"

Our site is already heavily SEOptimized, it comes up first.

As for the legal letterhead, we'd like to avoid spending thousands of dollars on something like this if possible, that just makes it more galling, you know?
posted by dacoit at 5:44 PM on August 27

Disclosure: I work for an ad agency.

Media professionals use tons of different tools to try to take a look at traffic to various sites. You're going to tell them 'we get 100k of traffic a day so advertise with us' but they're going to see if they can verify that info via a third party.

Common research platforms include comScore media metrix, Nielsen Netview, and others (including the free google ad planner) . Any media person worth their salt knows not to rely completely upon one platform vs another and knows the ins and outs of various research providers. I can tell you offhand that Quantcast is not one of the more respected players in the market (i.e. on part with Alexa - and not trusted particularly much).

To reiterate - its something to keep your eye on and have a rebuttal to - but not something I'd overly concern yourself about.
posted by jourman2 at 6:00 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

If you want the quickest solution, rather than worrying about standing on principal, you can register for a free publisher account. Go through the steps of claiming the profile for your site, then once they've automatically verified you, turn off access to as much data as possible and remove their claim/tracking code from your site.
posted by Good Brain at 6:06 PM on August 27

Yeah this is possibly slander or some tortious interference with business thing. I recommend talking with a lawyer if you think you are seriously losing money because of this. Or hell just email the company first, no threats, see what they say.
posted by norabarnacl3 at 6:39 PM on August 27

Isn't the third choice collect and disseminate your own demographic data?
posted by thewalledcity at 6:40 PM on August 27

Quantcast isn't doing anything slanderous or illegal here. It seems silly to suggest they are. They're attempting to make estimates about the quantity and quality of traffic that sites receive. As jourman2's excellent comment already noted, it's one tool of many. I use Quantcast to evaluate sites, but I don't take it as gospel.

If the OP believes Quantcast's information is inaccurate, the best way to remedy this is to provide them with accurate information. But I know from experience that means signing up for an account so that you can host their code on every page on your site. That's not an issue for me, but it might be for others. Even then, the data Quantcast generates is different from Google Analytics which is different that Sitemeter which is different than internal server logs. All of these sources of traffic data differ from each other. Which one is correct? I don't know. I use them all, and that gives me a rough idea of what I want to know.

But it does no good to get pissy at Quantcast (or Alexa, etc.) They're not doing anything illegal. They're not intentionally "harming" your company. They're trying to estimate traffic with imperfect methods. If your customers are new media professionals, they understand Quantcast already, and they know that estimated numbers are just that.

In short: It seems unlikely that you can stop them from doing this.
posted by jdroth at 7:48 PM on August 27

Just laugh whenever anyone mentions Quantcast. Seriously.
...sort of like how your mechanic would laugh at you when you said you knew a guy in Thailand who could repair your engine for $25.

Um, full disclosure: my sites are very narrowly-focused and tend to vet advertisers more than they vet us (ie., you have to prove your worth before we'll accept your ad, and we're fully prepared to go extended periods without ads if nobody passes muster. For us, ads are merely a supplementary revenue stream so we can afford to be ludicrously picky).
posted by aramaic at 8:18 PM on August 27

Can you publish your own stats on your own webpage? We recently did this, and looking at them now... yeah, the real stats are a magnitude higher than what quantcast says.

Maybe quantcast is purposely undercounting to try to get access to your server logs, and maybe everyone who cares already knows to multiply their 'estimated data' by 10x?
posted by rajbot at 8:49 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Hmm. I just looked at another one of our sites (that also publishes its stats to the website), and quantcast is only undercounting that site by 3x.

I was wrong about my previous assertion that they undercount all 'unverified' sites by 10x.
posted by rajbot at 8:58 PM on August 27

Seconding aramaic. Both Quantcast and Alexa are known to have crap numbers by anybody who pays serious attention to these things. Seriously, they probably measure usage numbers by latency or something totally fake and inferred like that. comScore is better, not sure about Nielsen. What I would do, if you have clients who are using this kind of data against you, is to create a report using your own stats. Logfiles, SNMP, etc. Put together a few-page topline with a couple of paragraphs about trends and such and give those to these people. Graph data should be at least a few months old with some topline hoo-hah about more recent figures, just to keep your edge. Screenshots/images from Google Analytics (if you use them) would also work here.
posted by rhizome at 9:08 PM on August 27

once they've automatically verified you, turn off access to as much data as possible and remove their claim/tracking code from your site.

This does not work. In fact it will do harm: they will start showing the real (measured) data, but then once you turn it off and remove the tracking code, it will show your traffic dropping to near-zero. It will NOT use the old "real" info as an estimate; it will re-estimate a lower level based on its "measure" of your "declining" traffic.

(Their methods do seem designed to maximize the chances you wouldn't dare ever turn it off.)

(Been through it.)
posted by rokusan at 1:07 AM on August 28

it will show your traffic dropping to near-zero

On the other hand, that would make it obvious to anyone looking at the page that the numbers are completely bogus.

(Looks like they're registering every visit to the site we're reading this on, by the way. Which means that they know who's posting to this thread :)
posted by effbot at 1:56 AM on August 28