SAN FRANCISCO, April 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Quantcast, the world's first open Internet ratings site, today announced that Netscape, WordPress and Answers.com have recently joined Quantcast's free Quantified Publisher program and are benefiting from accurate third-party audience ratings, powered by direct audience measurement.

"We've worked hard cultivating the Netscape member base," said Tom Drapeau, Director of Netscape. "With our recent shift to a social news focus, we wanted to see exactly how our community is developing. Until now, all available analytics have either understated or overstated our audience size. We care about -- and our advertisers deserve -- accurate metrics. With direct traffic measurements feeding advanced analytics, Quantcast's Quantified Publisher program is the first to deliver them."

Accurate audience data is increasingly precious. Online advertising spending exceeded $16 billion last year, but it was concentrated among a handful of web properties. Forty percent filled the coffers of just two companies. Traditionally, third-party audience ratings have been both prohibitively expensive for the majority of publishers and, due to the sampling approaches employed, fraught with error.

Recently, IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg highlighted this issue with an open letter to the industry's foremost traditional research services. On the need for better audience measurement, Rothenberg comments: "Imagine my surprise when I came to the IAB and discovered that the main audience measurement companies are still relying on panels -- a media-measurement technique invented for the radio industry exactly seven decades ago -- to quantify the Internet."

Quantcast brings Internet measurement into the Internet age with the Quantified Publisher program. This free service measures website audiences directly rather than by panel-based samples alone. Interpreting this data with state-of-the-art statistical models, the Quantified Publisher program levels the playing field by giving web publishers of all sizes accurate traffic, demographic and lifestyle data on their audiences.

"Quantcast combines powerful web analytics with easy-to-read charts and data," said Matt Mullenweg, Founder at WordPress. "Even though we have server logs and analytics about who visits the 800,000+ blogs on WordPress.com, it wasn't until we started using Quantcast that we got a sense of 'who' those people were. Bloggers finally have a real sense of their audience."

Quantcast's free web service, available at http://www.quantcast.com/, breaks down billions of monthly website visits to produce comprehensive audience reports for millions of web destinations. The Quantified Publisher program allows every web publisher, regardless of size, to participate directly through a simple measurement pixel. Those benefiting from the program already include Fox.com, Facebook.com, Answers.com, Indianapolis Colts (colts.com), TheNation.com, MIT Technology Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/), Gawker.com, The USC DailyTrojan.com, Weather Underground (WUnderground.com), The HuffingtonPost.com, deviantART.com, CollegeHumor.com, Techdirt.com, Nerve.com, Apartmentratings.com, SmugMug.com and thousands more.

"The transparency Quantcast brings to the web is invaluable," said Robert Formentin, VP of Advertising Sales at Answers.com. "As a publisher of authoritative content catering to different audiences and tastes, both we and our advertisers benefit from a trusted source that breaks down Internet audiences into actionable data."

"As the IAB recognizes, panel-based research has passed the breaking point for sizing Internet audiences," said Konrad Feldman, Co-Founder and CEO of Quantcast. "The Quantified Publisher program is the first ratings service to use direct measurement and we're delighted to have popular and significant destinations such as Netscape, WordPress and Answers.com as early program members."

About the Quantified Publisher Program

The Quantified Publisher program is a free service that improves ratings accuracy for websites via direct traffic measurement. Web publishers need only to add a small tag to their site's page to begin viewing detailed audience information. As a Quantified Publisher, site owners have control over their Quantcast profile and can access traffic widgets that can be easily added to display the site's status, reach and rank. All services are freely available. For more information, please visit http://www.quantcast.com/quantified-publisher.jsp.

About Quantcast

Based in San Francisco, Calif., Quantcast is dedicated to creating transparency in the online advertising marketplace. The Quantcast service analyzes billions of Internet visits each month to produce comprehensive traffic, demographic and lifestyle profiles of website audiences. Quantcast currently provides data for over 20 million websites. Access to the profiles is free and available at http://www.quantcast.com/.

NOTE: Quantcast is a trademarks of the Quantcast Corporation. All other registered or unregistered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.

Media Contact: Andy Coffaro FortyThree, Inc. 831-621-3773 quantcast@fortythreepr.com

CONTACT: Andy Coffaro of FortyThree, Inc., +1-831-621-3773, or
quantcast@fortythreepr.com, for Quantcast

Web site: http://www.quantcast.com/