{"id":785,"date":"2006-12-02T21:06:25","date_gmt":"2006-12-03T02:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/12\/02\/is-the-web-bubble-back-ask-hitwise\/"},"modified":"2006-12-02T21:06:25","modified_gmt":"2006-12-03T02:06:25","slug":"is-the-web-bubble-back-ask-hitwise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/12\/02\/is-the-web-bubble-back-ask-hitwise\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Web bubble back? Ask Hitwise"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the London Telegraph comes a rumour that Hitwise<\/a> — one of the half a dozen web-traffic measurement companies whose stats show up in press releases, and are used as fuel for takeover rumours — is itself the subject of takeover talks, with the price tag reportedly an eye-popping 180 million pounds or about $350-million (U.S.). Joe Duck says this sounds about right<\/a> if Hitwise charges its 1,200 or so clients an average of $2,500 a month for access to its data.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure where Joe gets those numbers from, but let’s assume he’s right. That works out to annual revenue of about $36-million, which makes the rumoured takeover price between 9 and 10 times revenue. Joe says that’s “not outrageous” for an established and growing Internet company, which leads me to believe one thing — no, not that Joe is on crack, but that he has a very high threshold for outrage. <\/p>\n

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I think between 9 and 10 times revenue is bubble-type math. And yes, I know that Google sells for<\/a> 15 times revenue; in fact, that actually helps my case. Obviously, traffic measurement is a hot area right now, primarily because advertisers are desperate to find a way of deciding where to put their money, and websites are desperate to find a way of proving they are the right place to put it.<\/p>\n

Using page views as a metric, as Steve Rubel notes<\/a>, is broken. But then, the different standards used by Hitwise and comScore and Nielsen and Alexa aren’t much better. As Matt Marshall pointed out<\/a>, website measurement as a whole is a train wreck. Alexa only measures users who install a browser plugin and is biased towards the U.S.; comScore uses a piece of software that has been accused of being spyware; Nielsen phones people and asks them what they do; and Hitwise uses ISP log files.<\/p>\n

What you typically wind up with is half a dozen measurements that all say something different — in some cases, one firm will show a website falling in popularity or flat, while another shows<\/a> its traffic zooming. Is Hitwise any better than its competitors? Who knows. But any way you slice it, 9 or 10 times revenue is a boatload of cash.<\/p>\n

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From the London Telegraph comes a rumour that Hitwise — one of the half a dozen web-traffic measurement companies whose stats show up in press releases, and are used as fuel for takeover rumours — is itself the subject of takeover talks, with the price tag reportedly an eye-popping 180 million pounds or about $350-million … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Is the Web bubble back? Ask Hitwise”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}