Compete is an excellent research tool for those who are interested in comparing the impact of competitive websites in any field.

Here is an example of a custom comparison of 5 top social network companies, based on the number of visits per month, over the period of the last 12 months.

From this graph, for example, one could draw a conclusion that the Myspace approach of allowing full site access to everyone, helped it gain a significantly higher number of daily visits that its competitor, Facebook, that only allows full profile access to approved friends.

Also, one can read from this graph that the impact of the top two (Myspace, Facebook) is significantly higher than that of the other three on the top list (Friendster, Hi5, Ning)

Compare tool also allows custom analytics based on the average stay per visit, percentage of total time spent on the internet by the users compared to the time spent on the site we’re interested in analyzing, comparison based on growth etc.