SpyFu – Competitive research tool

Ok, I'm going to be lazy today, and simply copy a press release for a new competitive research tool called SpyFu. Yeah, that's lazy, I know, but sue me... In any case, you'll get the info and it's info worth getting. 🙂 So, here it is...

Spy on your competition with SpyFu

Cave Creek, AZ – October 18, 2006 – Did you ever wonder who pays more for ads online MySpace or Classmates.com? Turns out, it is Classmates by a landslide, but what about your competitors? You, your competitors and nearly 4.5 million other domains are among those constantly monitored by SpyFu.com, a new site launched today by Velocityscape.

SpyFu.com is the long-anticipated sequel to Googspy.com, the free competitive research tool that became an instant destination for internet marketers when it was launched last year. The new site, currently in beta, is loaded with new features and packed with over twenty times more data. During the beta, even the subscriber-only features like downloadable Excel reports and statistics down to the specific web page will be free.

In addition, Velocityscape is offering custom analytics to enterprise clients. “Right now, we are talking to prospective clients interested in branded custom reports or in licensing the 350+ gigabytes of raw data,"? explains Velocityscape’s president, Michael Roberts. “Any company that manages an ad budget of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month can’t afford not to use our custom analytics. There is just so much money to be saved and opportunities to be discovered."?

"SpyFu is an essential tool for affiliate marketers,"? says Shawn Collins, co-founder of the Affiliate Summit conference. “Affiliates can leverage it to gain competitive intelligence and affiliate managers can use the data to monitor affiliate behavior. I rely on SpyFu daily to help me work more efficiently."

“SpyFu has proven an extremely useful tool for us,"? says Bret Giles Co-founder of Sitewire Marketspace Solutions. “As an online marketing agency, we're constantly looking for innovative ways to bring added value to our clients. SpyFu's ability to track pricing and integrate with Excel will be used by a lot of people in our industry."?

The site is powered by Velocityscape Web Scraper Plus+, which constantly extracts data from search engines, Alexa, Dmoz, Wikipedia, and other sources. “The whole process takes nearly ten thousand computing hours,"? boasts Ryan McLaughlin, Velocityscape’s engineer in charge of the process. “To give you an idea of the amount of data we’re dealing with: it’s more than 100 times the size of the US Yellowpages."?

“We put a lot into SpyFu,"? says Roberts, “Online Advertising is a $19B industry and no analytics database on this scale has ever been made available."?