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August 10, 2006

Traffic fight: Hitwise says Del.icio.us is soaring

Blake Robinson

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New numbers indicate that, just as the company says, Yahoo! owned del.icio.us has experienced substantial growth since the December acquisition. Respected traffic analysts Hitwise just posted a report that the site’s traffic has more than doubled since January.

Last week Michael Arrington made a series of posts here about some contested traffic stats on the popular social bookmarking service del.cio.us. His initial post focused on Comscore data, which showed traffic to the site declining (”Dazzle us again, Del.icio.us“) and Alexa data that was showing flatlined traffic. After a conversation with del.icio.us founder Joshua Schacter, Eckart Walther, VP Product for Search and Melissa Rische, PR Manager for Yahoo Search he posted a follow up on the post with information from Yahoo! claiming that del.icio.us growth was going strong. He said he had every reason to believe that the company was telling the truth and was thus most concerned about Comscore’s inability to get the numbers right.

Traffic numbers are maddeningly difficult to nail down, it’s an issue that’s rarely discussed but is a real problem. Many people say that in the new, Web 2.0 world the page view centric model is outdated - but it’s still a heavily relied upon metric. It’s never been solid though, and today’s Hitwise numbers illustrate that powerfully. If the top three traffic analysts have 3 wildly divergent estimates on the traffic of a large and important site - what’s a person to do? Each would defend their means of measurement (Hitwise does so here) but it’s a tough call for the rest of us. (See Matt Marshall on this same subject today for more.)

The one thing that’s easy to believe is Hitwise’s demographic data: social bookmarking traffic is still very small and dominated by financially secure men in their twenties. Much of the world is still unserved by this very useful class of tools.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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  2. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » トラフィック論争:”Del.icio.usは利用者急増中

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  4. It’s a Web-traffic counting traffic jam » Mathew Ingram: mathewingram.com/work

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  5. Webanalyticsbook.com

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  6. Tech Meat » Traffic fight: Hitwise says Del.icio.us is soaring

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  7. Digged Stories » Blog Archive » Traffic fight: Hitwise says Del.icio.us is soaring

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  8. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Comscore: MySpace Video traffic doubled in July

    August 15th, 2006 at 11:08 am

  9. » financially secure men in their twenties…

    August 23rd, 2006 at 11:08 pm

  10. The Digg Effect - Search for Diggs or get Dugg » Traffic fight: Hitwise says Del.icio.us is soaring

    August 30th, 2006 at 12:22 am

  11. Tech Industry » Traffic fight: Hitwise says Del.icio.us is soaring

    September 13th, 2006 at 11:48 pm

Comments

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  1. Ian

    August 10th, 2006 at 4:43 pm

    “Traffic numbers are maddeningly difficult to nail down”.

    Tell me about it! I have been able to assess the leaders in most sectors, and get some good statistics on a lot of them, but they’re all ‘maddeningly’ secretive when it comes to real figures.

    I guess, though, this means this isn’t a bubble in many senses. I don’t see many mega-million IPOs in Web 2.0. And I don’t believe that will be a realistic exit for some time.

  2. Nick Gavronsky

    August 10th, 2006 at 5:10 pm

    I think someone should start a company/interface that collects traffic data directly reported by companies and then aggregate that information. If it is supplied directly by the websites themselves, then we wouldnt have this kind of problem.

    But then again, I doubt companies would release their traffic reports. Oh well…

  3. foobar

    August 10th, 2006 at 5:21 pm

    Soaring… like the Hindenburg!

  4. Anonymous

    August 10th, 2006 at 5:23 pm

    I told you Mike was mad about not getting to announce the new features at del.icio.us ;)

  5. Michael Arrington

    August 10th, 2006 at 5:27 pm

    I was only a little mad. :-)

  6. cruncher

    August 10th, 2006 at 6:24 pm

    Delicious - Technology-wise, a lot easy to duplicate, that is why there are so many similar sites came up, however delicious pioneered social bookamrking,more than the technology, being the first is important, because you will have bigger community, more people will come to you if you have bigger community as they can find more relavent bookmarks.

    Delicious and StumbleUpon is a deadly combination.My interest is in math&algorithms and I googled quite a bit to find good sites, but soon after I found about delicious and SU, I found fabulous sites for my interests.

    I will always use delicious, for its simplicity in use and for its vast bookmarking community.

  7. thierry

    August 11th, 2006 at 12:46 am

    off course if you want to be really sure just look at how many bookmarks popular sites were getting before and how much now :)
    should be able to get a fairly strong trend out of that

  8. Anshul

    August 11th, 2006 at 1:04 am

    The last statement makes perfect sense. The majority of the world is not aware of these social tools and therefore measuring stats is necessary but they never tell the whole story.

  9. Sebastian

    August 11th, 2006 at 6:52 am

    Let’s stop fighting! The truth is, that the analytics industry doesn’t have any standards yet. Look how they collect data and then decide with your guts.

  10. Adam

    August 11th, 2006 at 10:30 am

    I must be blind or soemthing, but I don’t see anywhere on hitwise’s web site that you can get the traffic inforamtion….. do you have to sign up to get the views?

  11. Garth

    August 11th, 2006 at 11:16 am

    If social networking is going to go mainstream it will be throught the MyWeb at yahoo, and not some Web 2.0 junk with a silly name.

    From looking at the numbers it seems that del.icio.us is only used by people working at a Web 2.0 startup and their friends.

  12. Glen Barnes

    August 11th, 2006 at 7:48 pm

    It depends on what web analytics package they are using and if they want to share the results. In NZ we have Market Intelligence from Nielsen//NetRatings (I work for them). With this service all sites are measured using page tagging and the results are available to the whole market to view. The plus side of using this method is that the results are very accurate. The downside is that it only covers the sites which subscribe to our service. In NZ we are lucky in the fact that Market Intelligence is the ’standard’ used by the major sites so we have good coverage of most of the major sites.

  13. -B-

    August 11th, 2006 at 9:46 pm

    Ive been in this business for 10 years and Ive never seen accurate stats. Ive used a variety of stats tools on the same exact pages and they all return different numbers. I dont trust any of them (advertisers dont trust them either).

  14. Otis

    August 12th, 2006 at 7:59 pm

    Adam: I didn’t double-check this now, but I think HitWise data is not free. That information is their bread and butter.

  15. Rob Leathern

    August 13th, 2006 at 10:09 pm

    All sources of traffic data have their issues:
    - Nielsen//NetRatings data is good and pretty representative since it is a random-digit-dial phone-recruited panel, but it is fairly small in size so you are not able to see the level of detail that some of the other larger panels provide
    - Comscore data is fairly deep but their panel is pretty much based upon spyware, and people who have installed “download accelerators” just might evidence some inherent biases :-) (check out http://news.com.com/ComScore+S.....004-4.html for more)
    - Hitwise data is very deep but in using it especially in 2004-2005 I found several really weird anomalies that the company was unable to explain to me at the time (perhaps they would be able to now?), and since it is mostly based on ISP data and that data mostly seems to come from Juno/NetZero, there are again some pretty big inherent biases to contend with :-)
    - Alexa data is also based on downloads of their toolbar (I have a Firefox plugin that shows me Google PR and Alexa Rank for any page I’m on -very cool) and thus the audience tends to skew towards behaviors exhibited by people who like looking at Alexa data: great way to test this is to look at the traffic rank for sites like comscore.com or hitwise.com or netratings.com — big surprise you’ll see they rank much better than they would be expected to for a ‘normal’ population
    - Site traffic data itself also varies by methodology especially when it comes to counting visitors (cookie or no cookie etc.)

    So there are problems with all of them, and no method is going to give you the precise answer… I think more’s the pity that many of the discussions about traffic data and the needed simplifications of the methodology issues lead to silly bickering and a less-informed debate. BTW disclaimer I worked for Jupiter Media Metrix (Media Metrix product was sold to Comscore) and NetRatings, and have been a client user of all these various services. Contact me if you want to know what’s good for what when :-)

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