New Tools: Quantcast Launches Audience Search

Coverage here.

The system, unveiled in beta form yesterday, spits out lists of Web sites based on defined audience characteristics such as gender, household income or education level.

… Quantcast provides traffic and audience reports on 20 million Web sites, many of them too small to be tracked by comScore and Nielsen Online. In addition, the firm tracks audience data directly from 30,000 publishers, which it combines with panel data.

Until now, the firm displayed information in what [Quantcast CMO Adam] Gerber refers to as a “dictionary” style; audience data such as age range and family status was presented on pages associated with each individual publisher site, but couldn’t be organized based on audience criteria. “That’s not an efficient way for a media planner to work,” suggested Gerber.

Today, a search for sites attracting audiences similar to ESPN.com with audiences comprised of males aged 18 to 34 and earning $100,000 or more turned up a list including NBADraft.net and Sporting News. The system can filter results to include only sites that accept advertising or belong in specific categories.

The reason I like Quantcast is that it has a much better coverage than something like ComScore Media Metrix.   And it’s FREE.  This becomes very vital to smaller publishers and advertisers, reinforcing a great quote that I heard the other day:

The Internet is the great equalizer.