If you have a blog or website, it's to your advantage to have a way of looking as closely as possible at what users are doing on your site and to have a way of sharing analytical data from your site that's provided by a neutral third party.
ComScore, the industry standard among the big boys, announced Saturday at TechCrunch Disrupt that they are now making their basic service free for startups, with under a million unique visitors a month, via their new "Start-Up, Step-Up" program. This is good news for smaller sites that anticipate sizable growth in traffic for whatever reason.
I've applied to see basically how they'll respond and, hopefully, to be able to evaluate it but I'm not really in their target market. Currently I'm working with both Quantcast and Google Analytics.
Quantcast is cool because it's also tied to a public ranking service similar to Compete and allows you the option to have third party verified statistics in a public comparison setting.
Google Analytics is cool for some because it can be tied into other Google services to increase their information sharing, "all in order to help you sir and certainly not to increase our ability to monitor your short hairs once we take over the world", which is supposed to improve services.
I haven't really explored connecting things like Google Analytics and AdSense, which I also use. Google kind of creeps me out these days but their analytic tools are awesome and you can share access with individuals when needed for business purposes.
