This forum's ranking

Out of 20,266,794 sites, this one ranks at 822,685. Not too shabby, I must say!

http://www.quantcast.com/nepadigital.com

This site reaches fewer than 2000 U.S. monthly uniques.

Those state are completely flawed, the only one that knows what my stats are would be me because I can analyze the raw server stats. I get 2000 uniques in about 4 days. In only 2 days last winter at the top of the season.

There's really only two ways for someone besides me to gather traffic information Either through click-thru's such as a search engine. They can gather that data by mining it though there search pages which AFAIK the major search engines don't do. Or they gather it through an application the user has installed on their computer. For example if you install the Alexa toolbar from Amazon every time you view a page it records a hit.

Neither method is anywhere near accurate because the majority of people will not have that toolbar installed and sites that are more likely to have people that use Amazon visit are going to rank higher. As far as click-thru's that only counts for people that came to that site to begin with.

O.k. I don't remember taking a demographics poll on this site so how do they know our median income, age and education?

ktm rider wrote:O.k. I don't remember taking a demographics poll on this site so how do they know our median income, age and education?

They don't really but are taking a guess based on data mining. This a huge industry and the more sources they have the more accurate it will be. I mentioned the toolbar but that is only one tool, sites can place cookies on your machine when you visit that can track what you do. Note that this forum uses cookies but its only used for forum purposes such as the auto login.

There's other ways too, take those "club cards" offered by grocery stores for example. One of the reasons they offer them is to gather data about your spending habits. This information can be used for many things. The picture gets worse though because if the company mining the data from your grocery purchases is for example also working for someone like Amazon they can put the information together with what they gather from Amazon. Add that to other sources and it snowballs and in the end they have pretty good picture of who you are.

Just a quick example would work something like this. Lets say the grocery data says you buy a lot of steak. You purchase something from Site X and have to fill out form with full name and adress. They set a shared cookie on your machine from a third party. This third party also has the data from the grocery store. This cookie can be accessed by any site that has an agreement with the third party. You visit site Y sand they access the cookie to see who you are, find out you like steak and they serve you ads for steak.


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Just want to make it clear that no information provided to me is or will ever be shared with anyone whether its information you have entered into your profile or anything that is gathered through browsing the pages here. I have no affiliation with any other sites providing information about this one.

The Google ads are served based on the page content.

NEPAForum Admin wrote:

ktm rider wrote:O.k. I don't remember taking a demographics poll on this site so how do they know our median income, age and education?

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Just want to make it clear that no information provided to me is or will ever be shared with anyone whether its information you have entered into your profile or anything that is gathered through browsing the pages here. I have no affiliation with any other sites providing information about this one.

Sorry, I was in no was accusing you of providing personal info to outside sources. I just found it ammusing.

ktm rider wrote:
Sorry, I was in no was accusing you of providing personal info to outside sources. I just found it ammusing.

I didn't take it as you were. Cookies can be used for good and bad things. They were initially meant for just such purposes as they are used here.

When I signed up for my grocery store discount card years ago I gave them a phony name, "Mickey Mouse" 123 Main Street, Disney World, FL. All was fine for years. My grocery store grew and grew finally they build a huge new store with all the latest high tech stuff. You can now scan your own items as you put them in your cart. It works by picking up a battery powered hand held scanner at the door. You scan your discount card first then start shopping scanning each item as you put it in your cart. The first scan identifies you the customer, in my case Mikey Mouse. All the others form your invoice. At a special section of check out terminals you point your scanner at a reader, it downloads your invoice and prompts you for payment. Cash, check, credit, debit, etc. Well it matched my Mickey Mouse name with the name on my credit card and obviously it didn't match. That sent the one teenage security techo nurd into action. He just couldn't understand when I said with a straight face that I was really Mickey. Working up the chain of command came the store assistant manager. By this time I figured out what had happened and I now wanted to pay with cash. That was ok. Keep the customer happy. A couple of minutes of magic passwords, special manager keys and I had my change and receipt. I also had my special, printed just for me coupons. All customized for "Dear Mickey", or "Mr. Mouse". I've even gotten cat food coupons! Don't you just love it.