While there are many sources of Internet data that are paid, there happens to be more and more that are free. And for own edification, but also for yours as well, I thought I’d aggregate them all here and even say a few things about them.
Associations provide a lot of data. Here’s a few examples:
- The Internet Advertising Bureau provides Insights & Research
- The Mobile Marketing Association provides articles on Mobile Advertising
- SEMPO provides a bit of data on Search Engine Marketing
Blogs: There are a number of companies that do track statistics like Google Analytics or Webtrends for example. These companies though have blogs and are good places for where even they will share more general comments about statistics and their tracking tools in general. Check out Google Analytic’s blog or Webtrends company blog or even Omniture’s blog.
Comscore provides some incredibly interesting data. I’m used to their monthly search data which measures “core searches.” They even have a blog to check out.
Internet statistics by Econsultancy. There is a lot more on the site and so just take a look.
For Top Websites, you can turn to Alexa’s Top Sites, Compete.com provides you what they estimate is the traffic for any site you punch into their fields, and recently, I learned of Doubleclick’s efforts to keep track of the Top 1000 Most Visited websites on the web. And I totally forgot about Quantcast until recently. So, that’s another tool measuring traffic.
Forrester Research has been around for a very long time (at least in relation to the Internet). And I remember hearing regularly about them as sources in many articles in newspapers and many articles about Internet news. So, I ventured over to their site and noticed they have both consumer data and business data separated. While I didn’t spend too much time seeing if much of it was free, I did notice that the data seemed to be a bit older than other sources. I’d expect the data to be at least 2010 data, but the few data points I saw were from 2008 and 2009.
I’ve been getting Hitwise emails for quite a while now. I like them a lot. They give me details about specific industries. They also have a “data center” where they share information about search engine stats, top 10 websites, top search terms and more.
This site’s been around for a while that tries to provide Internet statistics, but isn’t as “official” as many of the other sources here. However, they shares some interesting information. So, we can’t ignore Internet World Stats, but I wouldn’t rely on them 100%. They do show you can be “reputable” by knowing your SEO.
Nielsen‘s been around forever measuring TV and now definitely the Internet. They have a couple interesting places to look for data: reports & downloads and top 10’s and trends.
Periodicals:
- Ad Age has a nice little data center
- Marketing Today‘s Tools
Pew Internet and American Life Project: do I need to say more? Definitely take a look through this great resource for Internet data.
Gov’t & int’l bodies trying to give statistics:
- Congressional Internet Caucus providing Internet Statistics (but a bit outdated)
- Fed Stats
- National Center for Education Statistics
- OECD Statistics
- U.S. Census Bureau’s Quick Facts
