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New York, New York - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - July 9, 2007 - Search engine, Answers.com, along with Netscape and WordPress, have joined the open Internet ratings web site, Quantcast’s Quantified Publisher Program, as 3.8 million topic inquiries for Internet users, are covered by answers.com.

Quantcast’s free Quantified Publisher program hopes to benefit its partners from accurate third-party audience ratings, powered by direct audience measurement. Tom Drapeau, Director of Netscape remarked, ”We’ve worked hard cultivating the Netscape member base. 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.”

According to the company, 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.

Mr. Rothenberg remarked, ”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 endeavors to bring Internet measurement into the Internet age with the Quantified Publisher program. The 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.

Matt Mullenweg, Founder at WordPress added, ”Quantcast combines powerful web analytics with easy-to-read charts and data. 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 is designed to break 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, 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 others.

Robert Formentin, VP of Advertising Sales at Answers.com commented, ”The transparency Quantcast brings to the web is invaluable. 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.”

Konrad Feldman, Co-Founder and CEO of Quantcast offered, ”As the IAB recognizes, panel-based research has passed the breaking point for sizing Internet audiences. 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.”

The Quantified Publisher program is a free service that endeavors to improve ratings accuracy for websites via direct traffic measurement. Web publishers may add a small tag to a website’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.

Based in San Francisco, Calif., Quantcast’s goal is to create 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.

Answers.com offers clear, authoritative content drawn from over 100 high-quality titles, as well as writing by its own editorial team. Founded in 1999 by CEO Bob Rosenschein, Answers Corporation also partners with, among others, Firefox, Opera, The New York Public Library and A9.com.

To learn more about Quantcast, please visit: www.quantcast.com.

For more information about Answers.com, please visit: www.answers.com.

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