"We're not going into the ad-network business, so to speak," Mr. Teresi told AdAge. "We look at how we enable the existing players to have a better digital-advertising opportunity." We're sure Teresi's telling family and friends that its the thrill and flexibility of startup life that prompted the move. And yes, probably startup life is better than working for the doomed to depart in disgrace Sue Decker these days. But we're still betting that when Teresi saw top management's new favorite exec former Right Media CEO Mike Walrath was moving to the Bay Area, Teresi went back and listened to a few old saved messages from a headhunter or two.

Quantcast is a fine and worthy startup. Its investors include Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Along with Compete.com, it's bringing a much-needed shakeup to the arcane business of Web-usage statistics. Quantcast's twist is that it measures website usage directly, as well as estimating it from surveys, as others do.

That, of course, is a subject of keen interest to the online media, to which Quantcast has catered expertly. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Valleywag, is a Quantcast customer.) Look no further than its widget-measurement service. Widgets — those bits of website code embedded on other Web pages — are a fad these days among Web publishers, and Quantcast promises to count not just regular website visitors, but users of other sites who see their widgets. Measuring widgets will likely just result in a swifter understanding of their irrelevance, but in the meantime, the flourish garners Quantcast attention from widget-obsessed publishers.

More attention than it deserves, though. Even with $20 million in the bank, Quantcast faces much larger competitors. And who does it serve outside of a circle of midsized Web publishers, too small for the current rating services but big enough to attract real advertisers? The size of that audience is what anyone rating Quantcast's chances should measure.

Traffic is down from last month's mega-high, but still well above September's record. 167,377,226 across the network for November. And our uniques continue to increase, 23.9m globally this month according to Quantcast. New highs for Valleywag, Consumerist, Kotaku and Jezebel.