techcrunch.com — "Amazon?s Alexa traffic reporting service has little credibility left among people who follow traffic trends... In August Alexa said that YouTube passed Google itself in total page views. They were wrong, but their data continues to perpetuate this alternate reality."
Nov 25, 2007 View in Crawl 4
jacquesmNov 26, 2007
statistics are like prostitutes, you can make them do whatever you want (quoting my business partner here).That said, alexa.com has it's uses. If a site is completely not on the radar there they probably don't have much traffic. If you're in the top 10,000 you probably have quite a bit. If you're in the top 100 you are successful, maybe not in general but at least in scamming alexa :)So, to make the discussion a bit more productive, here is my internal number of uniques:13500 for yesterday, and here is the alexa page for ww.com: <a class="user" href="http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/">http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/</a> ...That way you have at least one calibration point. Feel free to add more, I'd like to know how reliable this is as much as a lot of other readers of this thread and I have nothing to hide or fake.best regards,Jacques Mattheij CEO ww.com
zorlacNov 26, 2007
Alexa is to the internet what the Nielsen Ratings are to TV.It's amazing there are people still stupid enough to use either as a reliable source of data. This is the reason that great TV shows get canceled and we are left with 500 channels or CrapTV.It's also the reason web sites are sold for many times what they are worth.
drjsonNov 26, 2007
This is probably more useful to advertisers. Who is more likely to click on my dancing boxing monkey spyware cleaning pop up advert?
spikeleeNov 26, 2007
Great quality television does not mean s**t if you can't get people to watch it. It loses the network money and cuts away from programs that would make money for them.
robodonutNov 26, 2007
Close, but I wouldn't say that the problem is not the number of people who have it installed. The real problem is the type of people who knowingly install spyware. Their sample is not "sites that people visit", its "sites that insane people visit"
biggourguesNov 27, 2007
Spy ware, toolbars, surveys, aggregate data from participating ISPs. What other ways can you track the hits?
chrystie69Nov 27, 2007
yeah this isn't exactly news to those in the business but hopefully some of these marketing and PR firms will figure it out now!
michaellaneyNov 28, 2007
I thought Alexa was a pretty interesting website. I wondering if this is just a statistic anomaly or if someone forged the numbers.
dijitalNov 28, 2007
No... it can't be - I've been monitoring my site(s) rankings with it and I certainly haven't installed their toolbar. Also, I don't count their results as being absolutely conclusive, but they do in fact give you some inkling about the traffic to your site. This paired with Google Analytics, along with a few other technologies and you can begin to get an idea of traffic trends to your site(s).But depending on what your conversion metrics are, one key mistake is equating traffic with success.