Show HN: my hackathon project - free real-time web analytics | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: my hackathon project - free real-time web analytics

quantcast.com

39 pointsnecubi11 comments

Many of our publishers have opted to make all or portions of their real-time profiles public. See for example, gizmodo.com[0], stackoverflow [1], and Quantcast.com [2].

[0] https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-time/site/gizmodo.com

[1] https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-time/site/stackoverflow....

[2] https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-time/site/quantcast.com

Pretty impressive, we used Quantcast at my previous job and I was really impressed that you guys did for free what other services charge top dollar for. (Nothing wrong with charging top dollar, of course, but obviously if there is a quality free product...)

Some quick questions: 1. This is way more than a simple Show HN hackathon demo. :p I'm assuming you (and others?) spent some time on this? 2. When you say "currently ... (unique visitors)" - is that uniques across the entire time period (120 seconds?) or uniques at one second? What's the window for that calculation? 3. I'm assuming you do NOT use Storm for uniques calculation - just a custom script/job?

1. Yes, myself and another engineer (@schimmy_changa) spent about 4 months getting it ready for public use after releasing the initial version internally.

2. That's unique visitors "currently" on your site, where that's defined as having visited a page in the last five minutes. The question marks provide more detail on the various metrics.

3. Everything is computed in Storm. The reach (unique visitor) calculations are done using some proprietary stuff I don't think I can talk about (although we're working on a more engineering-focused blog post that will have more of these details).

I'm using Google Analytics for www.planza.com and was thinking on using Kissmetrics. How is Quantcast different?

Well, Quantcast is free, unlike kissmetrics. And it offers demographics information about visitor composition (ie age/gender/income/etc breakdown), unlike Google analytics (as far as I know). Many companies use both Quantcast and other metrics/analytics services for the differing types of information they offer.

Nothing is free.

Your website becomes a data collecting beacon for their advertising network (hence the awesome demographics).

Nothing wrong with that BTW, it's the same reason Google Analytics is free; but it's worth pointing out.

Our demographics are the best out there- you can figure out age, income, race, etc of people coming to your site.

We also offer an API where you can call out and receive info on the general demographic profile of a visitor (likely male, likely makes between 50-100k, etc) and then modify your pages in response.

And of course, a sweet real-time lobby display for your website ;)

If you put the tags on your site, you can actually go to the real-time page right now and see the results- no waiting!

This is great. Is there an API available to query the real time stats?

no, although if you check out the HTTP requests your browser is making to our servers, you might find something interesting ;)

again, there is no real-time API as of now, and don't count on anything staying put - this is a labs product!

wow. nice.

wait, I've built our entire business model on top of this feature you can't go all Google Reader on me now ;-)

In all seriousness, any hints on how this is brewing internal and the possibility of something non-lab in the future?

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