I think this trick could work if your competitor is displaying adsense the website.Start CPM campaign targeting his site with good CPM rate and you will be able to have good idea after 1 or 2 weeks about the traffic of your competitor.
I use a variety of methods to "guess" traffic. The obvious one is Alexa - although I always take into account that it is soley based on toolbar traffic, which tends to automatically kill off most office based traffic (not good if you are a business website) and it is generally quite US centric. A very good - and hideously accurate method - if you have a good credit card is Hitwise, who have access to actual ISP traffic logs, so you get an incredible amount of information about competitor websites. It is just very, very expensive to buy in - and they insist on an annual subscription.
Wouldn't it just be a better idea to create a better business than your competitor. Working on marketing, SEO, Social Networking, Affiliate Programs, and all the other stuff. Once your site is ranking better and offers better products and services, who cares about the competitors. Why worry about what you don't have when you can work on improving what you do have.
It will give you a vauge ballpark number, nothing more. 1) You'll never know what % of the time your ads are shown. 2) You will get an idea of the sites page views, not visitors. Unless you know the sites pageview per visitor ratio..... IMO this is a very expensive method to get data that's less than reliable.
Hi, There's an online tool, statbrain.com which guesses the number of visitors for a given url. I think it uses Alexa visitors and some other factors - and you can give it feedback to help them tune it. It used to be fairly good, but it's out by a factor of 10 on my site at the moment, because Alexa's not at all representative at the mo... Wonder how it is for you guys? Cheers, Paz.
Additionally, why would you want to be giving your competitor free cash just to see what his 'stats' are? You could look at alexa.com, as inaccurate as it might be, and get more of an idea -- it's free too
Yeah, it used to be OK for plus minus 50%, but as I say Alexa have made big changes. Help the guy out and hit the feedback button... Cheers, Paz.