

Show HN: my hackathon project - free real-time web analytics - necubi
https://www.quantcast.com/inside-quantcast/2013/06/quantcast-measure-now-in-real-time/

======
necubi
Many of our publishers have opted to make all or portions of their real-time
profiles public. See for example, gizmodo.com[0], stackoverflow [1], and
Quantcast.com [2].

[0] [https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-
time/site/gizmodo.com](https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-
time/site/gizmodo.com)

[1] [https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-
time/site/stackoverflow....](https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-
time/site/stackoverflow.com)

[2] [https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-
time/site/quantcast.com](https://www.quantcast.com/labs/real-
time/site/quantcast.com)

~~~
samspenc
Pretty impressive, we used Quantcast at my previous job and I was really
impressed that you guys did for free what other services charge top dollar
for. (Nothing wrong with charging top dollar, of course, but obviously if
there is a quality free product...)

Some quick questions: 1\. This is way more than a simple Show HN hackathon
demo. :p I'm assuming you (and others?) spent some time on this? 2\. When you
say "currently ... (unique visitors)" \- is that uniques across the entire
time period (120 seconds?) or uniques at one second? What's the window for
that calculation? 3\. I'm assuming you do NOT use Storm for uniques
calculation - just a custom script/job?

~~~
necubi
1\. Yes, myself and another engineer (@schimmy_changa) spent about 4 months
getting it ready for public use after releasing the initial version
internally.

2\. That's unique visitors "currently" on your site, where that's defined as
having visited a page in the last five minutes. The question marks provide
more detail on the various metrics.

3\. Everything is computed in Storm. The reach (unique visitor) calculations
are done using some proprietary stuff I don't think I can talk about (although
we're working on a more engineering-focused blog post that will have more of
these details).

------
jeroendesmet
I'm using Google Analytics for www.planza.com and was thinking on using
Kissmetrics. How is Quantcast different?

~~~
schimmy_changa
Our demographics are the best out there- you can figure out age, income, race,
etc of people coming to your site.

We also offer an API where you can call out and receive info on the general
demographic profile of a visitor (likely male, likely makes between 50-100k,
etc) and then modify your pages in response.

And of course, a sweet real-time lobby display for your website ;)

~~~
schimmy_changa
If you put the tags on your site, you can actually go to the real-time page
right now and see the results- no waiting!

------
frankacter
This is great. Is there an API available to query the real time stats?

~~~
schimmy_changa
no, although if you check out the HTTP requests your browser is making to our
servers, you might find something interesting ;)

again, there is no real-time API as of now, and don't count on anything
staying put - this is a labs product!

~~~
frankacter
wow. nice.

wait, I've built our entire business model on top of this feature you can't go
all Google Reader on me now ;-)

In all seriousness, any hints on how this is brewing internal and the
possibility of something non-lab in the future?

