Click

"Tancer is head of research for a company called Hitwise, one of the companies that provides research on websites. What it does is it covers all of people’s clicks, and then aggregates them to show which the most popular sites are in any particular category on any particular day or week or month. Clearly some people are looking at porn, and Bill Tancer does mention this in the book, but there are an awful lot of things that people do that have become very fundamental to the way they live their lives. Hitwise can pick up all these things, so it can see if people are booking flights, betting, spending time on kids sites. There is now a whole plethora of possibilities for internet users, and Hitwise tells you almost in real time what billions of users are doing. It’s quite interesting. There is a lot in the book about the surprising ways in which people behave. It’s very current, so if you have a subscription you can see what people in the UK were doing yesterday. The example that I love is that he can analyse the demographic data and say that the Republican states of America are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites than their Democratic counterparts, which I find very amusing. He goes on to say that Liberals can’t completely relax, because the Democratic states are more likely to visit adult entertainment and escort websites."