Like most bloggers, I’m quasi-obsessed (okay, obsessed) with blog statistics. If my blog gets 1,000 more pageviews than yesterday, I want to know why, who and what. That said, there are literally dozens of ways to measure blog statistics so getting a real handle on your traffic can be a huge challenge. For example, when I was using Blogware, I was rock star, and now that I’m on WordPress and part of the b5media network, AWStats also makes me look like one of the “in” kids. But then, I’ll wander over to Google Analytics where the the number of unique visitors and pageviews are so low, I get depressed. Meanwhile, Quantcast sits firmly in the middle of the road between AWStats and Google Analytics.

Now, Read/WriteWeb has a post on Compete, which is offering a whole new way to approach Web stats with something called “Attention Metrics”, which is based on two key issues:

- Attention: The total time spent on a site as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users
- Velocity: The relative change in daily Attention; velocity is used to determine the relative growth of a Web site compared to other sites.

If you’re a blogger, an advertiser or an investor, what metric(s) do you rely on? If you’re a company trying to attracting advertising or financing, using AWStats is a no-brainer because it appears to be the most generous when it comes to unique visitors and pageviews. If you’re an advertiser, however, using CPM, you may want to use something different such as ad server logs. Then, you’ve got Compete, which wants to sell you on a whole new way of looking at things.

So is time for the Internet Advertising Bureau to lead a campaign to standardize statistics to everyone can get on the same page? Update: TechCrunch weighs in Compete, and some of the issues happening in the Web tracking market.

{democracy:5}

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