Breck’s Homepage

Call me a geek, but one of my favorite things about the beginning of each month is seeing the new Compete.com traffic figures for websites I visit. What’s even geekier is that it takes a few days before the new data is made available and I eagerly check a few times a day to see if it’s happened yet. (sidenote: I’m sure there’s a method and routine to this–does anyone know what day the data’s updated?)

The Compete plugin puts the “People Count: #” in the bottom right of your browser where # is the number of U.S. visitors that site received in the previous month. For instance, the people count for this website is 4,080. That means that about 4 thousand people in the U.S. visited this site in May, according to Compete. In a few days, that number will change to reflect June’s visits. The numbers are certainly off–this website actually only saw about 2k visitors in May, while another site I run gets 8k visitors a month and Compete doesn’t show any–but it’s nice to have a large confidence interval than no interval at all, if you’re not making important decisions of course. The real beauty of the Compete plugin is that it quickly gives me a tool to measure either the reputation of an old site or the growth rate of a new site. An arbitrary, biased, superficial tool to be sure, but it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Damn, still not updated.