I really like what Quantcast has been doing, putting out pretty decent quality data not just traffic but also sub-components like user affinities, demographics, and keywords that led to traffic at a particular site. They also allow sites to “get Quantified”, tag their own pages in order to create better-quality, more-accurate numbers.

Nobody said the measurement game was easy though, and sometimes screwy stuff can happen. Like what I stumbled across this evening when looking at their top 100 sites, I saw a name I hadn’t noticed before: Playlist.com. It looks like a social network playlist and music sharing tool — no doubt a bit hit with the Myspace crowd. Anyhow, it looks like they are in the process of getting quantified and as such are now ranked 9th in overall traffic with a whopping 45 million US uniques! Here’s the screenshot I took and the page where I saw it at around 4.30pm on 12/23:

Now I thought that this seemed like a big rise since I had not heard of these guys recently, so I did a Google search and looked in the cache for their Quantcast ranking page. Here it is, with the Google cache date reading “Dec 22, 2007 15:40:04 GMT”: (click to check it out)

So basically in 24 hours Playlist.com went from a Rank of 70,752 to a rank of 9, from 22,461 users to 45,442,681!! Now if that’s not a sharp jump up, I don’t know what is…. While I appreciate and love what Quantcast is doing to add much needed additional data perspective, one also has to question the integrity of the Quantified data. I don’t know much about this site and service (Playlist) but this data seems to have been gathered, published and incorporated into their product extremely quickly. It either points to an unbelievably swift rise in terms of traffic, and/or a deficient process or product on Quantcast’s side. I’ve popped in a question to the Quantcast team. Even though it’s Sunday before Christmas, I’ll be eager to watch to see what happens with this and will share it here.

UPDATE: I used the “Contact Us” button and two people got back to me pretty much right away!  Here is what they said:

“Thanks for bringing that to our attention. Icanhascheezburger.com at rank 21 and veoh.com at rank 30 look equally as suspect. All of these are “quantification in progress”. We’ll take a look at it. It’s most likely a bug or process problem on our end.”

 ”Thanks for writing.  Playlist.com did begin the quantification process yesterday so they are not fully Quantified yet.  Usually the first few days the code is live there will be a lot of fluctuation with a sites ranking and traffic.  To be clear, this is likely an overestimate of the traffic, but it should clear up within 3-4 days.”