Web Analytics Service firm QuantCast gets $20M funding

The more web publishers know about their audience, the better positioned they are to sell advertising. That’s the driving force behind web analytics startup Quantcast, which on Tuesday announced a $20 million second round of funding led by the Founders Fund and Polaris Venture Partners.

“Quantcast is changing the way the media industry measures and identifies audience segments through a collaborative, direct-measurement platform,” said Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman in a statement.

San Francisco-based Quantcast hopes to do this by analyzing massive amounts of data on demographics, web sites, and web surfers and then building specific audience profiles and traffic volume for sites.

The ace up its sleeve is its open Quantified Publisher program. Web publishers tag their sites, which allows Quantcast to measure their activity, and then publishers receive Quantcast’s data for their sites for free.

The more web publishers that join—to date, 20,000 and counting—the more data Quantcast has and the more accurate a picture the startup can create of Internet traffic.

While popular web analytics services such as comScore and NetRatings use surveys of web surfers to estimate traffic, Quantcast combines similar “panel” surveys with data gleaned from their Quantified Publisher program.

“If you look under the hood of Quantcast, they are doing billion of sets of analysis,” said Mike Hirshland, of Polaris Venture Partners.

Mr. Hirshland said the Quantcast founders have backgrounds in statistical analysis for the financial industry, and they’re now taking that experience directly to web publishers. The result, he said, should be a more accurate picture of who’s viewing web sites.

Advertisers and publishers could be thrilled if Quantcast can do what it has set out to do. Mr. Feldman said the company eventually hopes to leverage its data to bring publishers and advertisers together—and make money in the process.

But he would not comment on any revenue-generating partnerships to date, saying only that the company is focused on providing more accurate data to its network of publishers—for free.

Launched in September 2006, Quantcast now has a total venture funding of $26 million.
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