Hitwise, an Experian company was founded in February 1997 as a solution to a new problem – only the large websites, such as Yahoo!, MSN and Amazon were being monitored comparatively and data on websites with a more limited reach, such as Colgate, Nissan, and L’Oreal – was not available.

The reason for this is that the methodology used by the existing online measurement companies was not cost effective and so could not effectively scale to measure a medium like the Internet. These companies simply applied the television ratings methodology (software sitting in a person’s home) to the Internet. As a result, only a relatively small number of people (10,000 to 50,000) people were able to be monitored, which meant only a relatively small number of websites (top 1000) were reported in the rankings.

Instead, Hitwise applied a new measurement method to the new medium, realizing that by working with ISP networks, (instead of recruiting individual panel members) it would be possible to anonymously monitor more people, and therefore report on more websites.Using this new method Hitwise could cost effectively and anonymously monitor millions of Internet users, and therefore report on hundreds of thousands of websites, in addition to the top few.

As a result, while many other measurement companies have relatively small client bases, Hitwise data is relevant to over 1 million online businesses.