We (the developers) are actually beginning to feel like it's one of the biggest Django sites on the interweb right now. Definitely not trying to toot my own horn here, but we're
gaining users like mad and traffic is insane.
Disclaimer: I figure the OP's question is more directed at HN members rather than YC startups, but for the record we're not a YC startup
Sorry to call you out, but your directly quantified Quantcast results show you at less than 1k uniques per day.
There are a LOT of Django sites out there with considerably more traffic and it misrepresents the size of the Django community to suggest that, "one of the biggest Django sites" is only serving a few hundred hits a day.
We get a lot less traffic during the summer months (school isn't in session) and towards the end of the year for the holidays... but we do get quite more traffic than our quantcast page suggests.
It does look like I was totally full of my own shit though, we're clearly not that big when it comes to the other Django sites out there.
It looks like an average of 50,000 monthly uniques when school is in session. Do you mind sharing your actual numbers?
And can you hazard a guess why Quantcast is so inaccurate? It seems curious, considering you have their javascript tracking code on every page of your site. If their tracker is so broken, why use them and not Google Analytics?
This comes up with some frequency. Uniques daily * 30 != uniques monthly, after all, if you undouble on a monthly basis and you get 30K visitors each day and they're all different it looks like you have a cool 900K uniques monthly. But at the same time it means you are completely not sticky! All your users are replaced by new ones every single day.
A better measure is uniques daily, daily growth in uniques and compare that with your uniques monthly. If you're doing it right you should see (30average repeats) + (30average growth)
Those are figures that you can do some planning on. Monthly uniques does not do anything other than look good on paper. Bad websites look even better :)
As I understand it, Quantcast's monthly uniques is the totally number of different users to visit the site during that month. I assumed that daily uniques were meaningless because of the nature of SchoolRack. Not every student logs in every day. It seemed reasonable to assume that a month is a reasonable amount of time for most students, teachers, and parents to login at least once. This tells you the actual number of people who actively use such a service.
Comparing Quantcast's estimates to the actual stats for a few sites I run (and have access to full logs/anayltics for) shows that Quantcast is severely (read: at least one order of magnitude in a couple cases) lowballing.
I believe the OP, I don't mind sharing my own stats, we're somewhere between 10 and 15 K uniques daily, google has us pegged at about 100k uniques (don't ask me what they're smoking there, probably something to do with subdomains), here is the alexa graph comparing ww.com and schoolrack.com, you can draw your own conclusions.
A tripling of your traffic in 30 days during the 'off' season is a pretty good showing in my book, as long as it
wasn't when coming from '10' users to '30' users :)
Quantcast's "Directly Quantified" stats come from the publisher embedding Quantcast's js tracking on their site - so it's kind of like making your Google Analytics data public.
just a heads up: on the about page this sentence ->
Our mission from the onset has been to seamlessly connecting teachers, students, and parents through the Internet.
We (the developers) are actually beginning to feel like it's one of the biggest Django sites on the interweb right now. Definitely not trying to toot my own horn here, but we're gaining users like mad and traffic is insane.
Disclaimer: I figure the OP's question is more directed at HN members rather than YC startups, but for the record we're not a YC startup