The growing number of free services online is great for consumers and troublesome for businesses - because in many cases it means revenue generation models are going to have to change in order for them to stay alive.

Take Web metrics, for instance. Nielsen subscribers can get detailed information about visits to their Web sites and their competitors' sites.

Nielsen last year showed the Honolulu Star-Bulletin as the No. 1 online news source in Hawaii for most months of the year.

Now however, advertising agencies, media strategists and consumers, can find Web metrics for free, by using sites such as quantcast.com.

Google and Yahoo! offer Web analytics services, according to the New York Times. It also reported on a free analytics service by start-up Nuconomy called Studio Web.

San Francisco-based Quantcast Corp. has been around since 2005 and recently joined the Media Rating Council audit process.

The starbulletin.com does not appear as the No. 1 news site in Hawaii at quantcast.com, but reaching an estimated 320,000 users per month, it not far behind Brand X.

The site also provides demographic information for the sites it rates, whether the numbers reflect estimates, or whether the sites have registered with Quantcast and are providing direct measurement as what the company calls a Quantified Publisher, a term it has trademarked.

Site visitors can check out the nation's top Web sites and see where their favorite local sites rank.

Google is No. 1, with more than 136 million U.S. visitors monthly.

Starbulletin.com is ranked at No. 4,923, ahead of most other Hawaii media sites.

Among other media, KITV.com gets more than 157,000 U.S. visitors monthly, more than all other local TV stations combined. It is in the top 10,000 sites, according to Quantcast.

It should be noted that KITV and KGMB are registered with Quantcast while the other stations' figures are estimates.

Neighbor island newspaper sites are led by West Hawaii Today, ranked at No. 36,258, followed by the Maui News, Kauai's the Garden Island and Hilo's Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

However, one local radio station ranks above the Maui News and other neighbor island papers.

Sportsradio1420.com, the Web site of KKEA-AM 1420, is the top-visited radio Web site in Hawaii, according to Quantcast.

Only three other Hawaii radio station Web sites are on Quantcast's radar screen: kccnfm100.com and hawaiian105.com, each with about 5,000 monthly visitors, and kssk radio.com with about 1,500 monthly visitors.