I'm wondering how sites like the one listed below work. It's a site where you enter in the link to a website, and it tells you about how many hits the site gets and the estimated demographics of the site's visitors. The page for my site is fairly accurate. "The site caters to a very slightly male biased group." Largest age group: 25-44 (which I think is accurate). Where is this site picking up this information from?

-- Modified on 3/23/2008 6:30:35 AM

It is interesting that it examines lower traffic websites.  

They have "a panel of several million people who anonymously share their web usage history."   Basically the individuals' PCs have a program installed that collects a list of all of the websites visited (or just uses IE History) and sends it off to Quantcast.  The company will also collect demographics (income, sex, race, etc) from those individuals.  So they can then use that to create a profile of your visitors.  It's a fairly common thing.  Nielsen (the TV ratings people) is one of the big players in this space.

They say it is submitted anonymously (probably true). But I wonder if it is also voluntarily because they have several million people in the sample and that is a huge sample.  Makes me wonder if they have partnered with ISPs or if their software is installed surreptitiously along with some other useful software.

Not sure how much weight I would put on it with respect to an escort or similar sites.  People who are likely to visit those sites are unlikely to want to be monitored.  I certainly don't.

They have tracking cookies that can trace every hit to your site.  It will scan 1000's of cookies and compile the personal data that it finds all in a matter of seconds.  That is compiled with a personal profile of the sites images and key words that are used upon the site.  That information is pushed through a personal profiles system that can set general parameters for site usablility and audience participation.

yet her site knows that it was mostly male.  So people who you think would not want to be monitored are being monitored.  Troubling for me.

Agreed, absolutely troubling, especially considering what Trygger mentioned above:

    They have "a panel of several million people
    who anonymously share their web usage history."  
    Basically the individuals' PCs have a program
    installed that collects a list of all of the
    websites visited (or just uses IE History) and
    sends it off to Quantcast.

Sounds like what amounts to spyware.

I don't get it. Who installs these tracking cookies so that this particular company has access to them? Can one company pick up cookies that an unrelated site has left behind?

And then you're saying that the key words are used to make assumptions about the audience of the site? That makes sense.

That is interesting. They say that they get "publishers’ cooperation"- the "publisher" being the site owner or hosting company? What about the sites that don't give cooperation? Are statistics estimated based off the ones that do?

I've always wondered about Nielson ratings, too. How do they get that information?

who we are... what we earn and who lives with us... etc....  

not sure that the infor that is gathered is volunteered.... routinely I scan my computers for spyware, trojans, viruses and what not... but I know that no matter how current or how many sweepers I use.... all it takes is one...

the one....

and all is lost... perhaps we should all hide in plain sight...??? but that has been tried.

Eeverything you do on your computer is save on a cookie...EVERYTHING!

When you log into a site that has trackers, it can pick out certain cookies depending on how the tracker is designed.  If it is designed to pick up ages, it will search every cookie you have on your computer that gives and age.   If it is designed to pick up gender, it will search every cookie in your computer for gender markers.  If it is designed to determine wether you are employed it would search for cookies related to job searches.  Does that make sense?

Have you ever logged into a site or had a pop up add on your computer monitor that showed what city you lived in?  That site has a cookie tracker that searches your system for any indicators of your IP address, or forms you have filled out with your zip code on it.  Then it knows what city you live in.

I hope this makes sense.

Programmers can create these cookie trackers in a matter of hours.  You can even purchase programs designed to do these various searches.