Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) will purchase Web metrics firm Compete for $75 million in cash and another $75 million in an earnout through 2010. Compete lost $4.5 million last year on $14.9 in revenue. [SAI]

A loyal reader and apparent Facebook enthusiast notes in his Facebook status, "so valleywag apparently has a bigger boner for FB than i do ... weird, huh?" I can only assume this comment comes in response to our chart yesterday showing Facebook's vast superiority to the gang of also-rans Google has rousted up to support OpenSocial. But here's the thing. No way do we have the biggest boner for Facebook. That prize goes to Alexa. Care to inspect for yourself?

"Quite rationally, our board felt we were giving away a really valuable asset, and no amount of provocative quotes from John Battelle or The Cluetrain Manifesto could assuage them," Stephen DiMarco, chief marketing officer of Web analytics company Compete, on how the board reacted to providing free access to their data. [How to Change the World]

Compete, the website-measurement startup, announced that Microsoft had boosted its share of U.S. search queries by two-thirds from May to June. Microsoft's share is still small: It grew from 8.4 percent to 13.2 percent of the total market, largely at Google's expense. So how did it do it? The answer is simple: payola. Microsoft's Live Search Club offers prizes to search users. But other search engines have offered similar payoffs to spur traffic with far less dramatic results. Here's why Live Search Club is succeeding as a payola scheme — but failing as a business maneuver.