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.

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.   More detail...