Taming the Beast

If you haven’t been on a 10-year-long deep sea voyage or a stakeout in the outer reaches of the Himalayas, then you’ve probably witnessed firsthand the astronomical growth the Internet has experienced in the past decade. With over 240 million unique websites and 1.6 billion people worldwide accessing them, the Internet has morphed into an enormous and unruly beast with endless content choices, not to mention the sheer amount of data swirling around it. So what to do with such of information? Quantify it. And this is just what Quantcast has done. The three-year-old company has managed to harness the raw power that is knowledge by using their team of web analytics experts to measure and organize the Internet’s audiences. By typing a website into their profile engine, users can see a rough markup of any of the top 1 million sites' audience demographic, sites this audience also likes, daily traffic, and site rank, among other information. This online service is revolutionizing the method in which business and media companies target their desired audiences and the way the Internet itself is being viewed. So with Quantcast, maybe the World Wide Web isn’t such a daunting place after all.