How do sites count other sites' visitors and "value", and how can they tell users' location?

Question

Hi actually this is a simple question but just came up out of the curiosity...

I have seen a web evaluation online tool recently called teqpad.com.I have lots of queries on it

1. How do they do it?? eg:page views daily visitors etc. without mapping real website??...
2. Website worth...is this getting any near to any site??
3. I don't know how do they got daily revenue??
4. I like traffic by country..it has seen same like in Google analytic s..how they got that info??
5. another one is ISP info and Google map location of server..

is there any one here done similar scripts?? if so what is your opinion??

Answer 1

1. They may be tracking user browser stats like Alexa does. (More info on Wikipedia.) A group of users installs a plug-in that reports which sites each user visits, like TV ratings work in most (all?) countries. This method is obviously not very reliable, and often nowhere near the actual numbers of visitors.

2. This is usually based on bullshit pseudo-scientific calculations and never a viable basis for evaluating the "value" of a web site, even though it may be possible to guesstimate the approximate ad revenues a site yields (see 3) But that is only one revenue stream - it says nothing about how expensive the site's daily maintenance is - servers, staff, content creation....

3. It should be possible to very roughly estimate daily revenue by taking the guesses on daily visitors/page views, count the frequency with which ads are shown, and look at what those ads usually yield per page view. It is probably pretty easy to get some rough numbers on what an ad view is worth on a big site if you're in the market.

4. and 5. It is possible to track down most IP addresses down to the visitor's country and sometimes even city. See the Geo targeting article on Wikipedia