Mathew I think you are right that my “threshhold for outrage” has been raised quite a bit watching what many - even Silicon Valley insiders - are starting to refer to as “Bubble 2.0″. My numbers were speculative, based on pitches I’ve had from Hitwise and from a few associates who use the service. I’d started to write a post suggesting the valuation was simply nuts, but if my numbers are close I’d say they are “shooting high”, rather than “crazy”. Iit seems the high stakes game is back and Hitwise is a “real” company with a solid history and good future potential. I’m not buying Hitwise shares, but also wrongly advised people to avoid Google at 100 … 200 … 300 … 400

Thanks for the comment, Joe — and I appreciate you giving me the context for the stats you used about Hitwise. I wasn’t suggesting that they weren’t valid, just trying to be cautious (reporter training :-) ). I also advised people that Google was overvalued all the way up from $80 or whatever it was, much to my chagrin. On the other hand, I don’t think Hitwise is another Google by any means. In any case, I appreciate you stopping by.

bots and splogs troll around pinging Web sites and skewing traffic numbers. That said, there has been plenty of M&A interest in the stats business what with Google buying MeasureMap and FeedBurner acquired BlogBeat. For more thoughts, check out Mathew Ingram and Joe Duck. For some insight into the controversy surrounding the accuracy of Web statistics, check out this recent BusinessWeek story, as well as Webanalyticsbook.com. Technorati Tags: ComScore,

Discussion: Tim O’Reilly, Peter Brantley The semantics web source: Nick Carr A Bubble Watcher Watches Google source: New York Times Hitwise eyes up £180m sale source: Telegraph Discussion: PaidContent, Mathew Ingram, Joe Duck Ok, Now I Get JPG Magazine source: TechCrunch

Is the Web bubble back? Ask Hitwise via Mathew Ingram: mathewingram.com/work December 3rd, 2006 at 02:06

Hitwise charges $20,000 a year..

Comscore charts north of $60,000 and those BS stats they release to the public aren’t even related to the stats they sell customers. When you see the “real” stats they sell it ends up being close to the other services.

Thanks for that, Markus. So I guess they keep the good data for the clients :-)

This is a cool 3 million per month or 36 million per year. For an established and growing internet company asking 9-10x annual revenues is not outrageous. I’m guessing they’ll be thrilled to get half that, but… I say rock on Hitwise dudes! Mathew Ingram is seeing 2.0 bubbles and thinks I have a high threshhold for outrage December 2nd, 2006 Posted by joeduck | advertising, companies, investments | 1 Comment

[...] Is The Web Bubble Back? Ask Hitwise By: Mathew Ingram 2006-12-04 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 (U.S.). Link: a rumour that Hitwise Joe Duck says this sounds about right if Hitwise charges its 1,200 or so clients an average of $2,500 a month for access to its data. 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. I think between 9 and 10 times revenue is bubble-type math. And yes, I know that Google sells for 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. Using page views as a metric, as Steve Rubel notes, 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, 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. 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 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. Comment Tag: Hitwise Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | FurlView All Articles by Mathew Ingram About the Author: Mathew Ingram [note only one "t" in Mathew] is a technology writer and blogger for the Globe and Mail, a national newspaper based in Toronto, and also writes about the Web and media at http://www.mathewingram.com/work and http://www.mathewingram.com/media. [...]