Taylor Nelson Sofres, a London, England based market research company has paid $75 million to have Compete.com integrated into their company.  Compete could receive an additional $75 million in earn-outs through 2010 as well [Source: Techcrunch].

Compete.com mines data from 2 million Compete Toolbar users to monitor online behavior.  TNS will use this data for the purpose of providing extra services to their own clients.

Compete.com will remain operating as a stand-alone company.  Compete raised $43 million in capital since 2000 from various venture capital firms including Charles River Ventures, Commonwealth Capital, Chicago Growth Partners, and Split Rock Partners.

Competitors include Alexa, comScore, and Quantcast.  The power of analytics reporting has on Wall Street was recently demonstrated when comScore revealed a slip in Google Ads clicks.  GOOG stock dropped heavily shortly after comScore’s announcement.

I read this very interesting article on Read/Write Web about how Compete.com will be taking on Alexa in the web analytics market.  Compete has recently opened up a new search engine and web analytics tools for its users.  Compete used to provide web analytics privately.

The name of the web analytics software is called SnapShot and it collects data using a toolbar, ISPs, Opt-in Panels, and other Application Providers.  Alexa just uses its toolbar to collect visitor information and assign rankings.  Read/Write Web states, “As with Alexa, there is ranking, pages/visit, avg stay and comparisons (up to 3 domains in total). There’s also a People metric - an estimate of unique visitors to a site.”

Some of the limitations that Read/Write Web has listed is that the rankings are only U.S. based for Compete.com thus leading to inaccuracy and that Compete does not cater to blogs and other small websites.  Read/Write Web tested their own website along with TechCrunch and found that the estimations were defective.

Compete.com was created by Bill Gross in 2000.  Bill Gross is known for his involvement in goto.com and overture.com.