TNS Buys Comscore Competitor Compete For Up to $150m

London-based market research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres [TNS] has acquired Compete for $75 million. Another $75 million in possible earn-outs through 2010 brings the total acquisition price up to $150 million. Publicly-traded comScore (Nasdaq: COMS), by comparison, has market cap of $570 million.

TNS will use the data culled from Compete’s panel of 2 million Web surfers to measure online purchasing behavior and the effectiveness of online ads. Compete started out as an Idealab company, and has raised about $43 million since 2000. Other investors include Charles River Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Partners, North Hill Ventures, Split Rock Partners, and William Blair Capital Partners. They were undoubtedly probably hoping for a better outcome, but a solid double is better than a strike out. (Update: Here’s the Compete blog post about the deal).

Compete’s revenues in 2007 rose 50 percent to $15 million, but it lost $4.5 million. Compete offers Web traffic stats for free on its site Compete.com, and competes with Amazon-owned (AMZN) Alexa, Quantcast, (both also free) and comScore (not free). According to Compete’s own stats, it attracts about the same number of U.S. visitors a month as Alexa (727,000 for Compete vs. 758,000 for Alexa), but Quantcast is the leader with more than double that (1.9 million uniques).