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

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

Tech Industry » Traffic fight: Hitwise says Del.icio.us is soaring — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 06:48:05 +0000

[...] 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 siteâ??s traffic has more than doubled since January. read more | digg story [...]

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

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 08:22:16 +0000

[...] 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 siteâ��s traffic has more than doubled since January. read more | digg story [...]

By: » financially secure men in their twenties…

» financially secure men in their twenties… — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 07:08:33 +0000

[...] See what this article tells us about del.icio.us users: [...]

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

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:08:28 +0000

[...] Traffic numbers are a real stab in the dark, and the last time we reported on Comscore numbers it was regarding Del.icio.us. Comscore showed a decline in the site’s traffic, owner Yahoo! insisted that the data was incorrect and Hitwise backed up Yahoo! statements with numbers last week. [...]

By: Rob Leathern

Rob Leathern — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 06:09:29 +0000

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

By: Otis

Otis — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 03:59:35 +0000

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

By: -B-

-B- — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 05:46:29 +0000

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).

By: Glen Barnes

Glen Barnes — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 03:48:17 +0000

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.

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

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 02:48:49 +0000

[...] read more | digg story [...]

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

Tech Meat » Traffic fight: Hitwise says Del.icio.us is soaring — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 21:50:00 +0000

[...] read more | digg story [...]

By: Garth

Garth — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 19:16:06 +0000

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.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:30:51 +0000

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?

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:52:27 +0000

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.

By: Webanalyticsbook.com

Webanalyticsbook.com — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:44:57 +0000

Measuring user generated content…

The average pageview per visit, the percentage of low recency visitors and the order conversion rate of campaign x may beÂ something new forÂ your CFO or CEO, but notÂ for you.
Since Craigslist, Myspace, Friendster, Youtube, Coke(!)Â and all th…

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

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:26:04 +0000

[...] The dancing around in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s recent post at TechCrunch is almost comical, although to be fair at least Marshall is trying to get the story straight. He notes that Mike Arrington wrote about del.icio.us awhile back and was critical because its traffic was stagnating, but then had a chat with creator Josh Schachter and some Yahoo folks (I’m sure no bright lights or sleep deprivation was involved — Yahoo is much more subtle) and now TechCrunch is convinced by a Hitwise report that traffic has doubled. [...]

By: Anshul

Anshul — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 09:04:17 +0000

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.

By: thierry

thierry — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:46:25 +0000

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

By: mkaz.com

mkaz.com — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 06:38:18 +0000

Web Metrics: Measuring Blog Popularity…

Web site usage metrics is far more art than science, most numbers come with a healthy dose of bias……

By: 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

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 — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 03:46:28 +0000

[...] Hitwiseの人口統計だけは、すんなり信じることができる。ソーシャル･ブックマーキングのトラフィックはまだ小さいし、お金の心配のない20代男性がほとんど。こんなに使えるツールなのに世の中の人の大半は、まだその恩恵に預かっていないんだよね。【日本版ひとこと】記事中でリンクされているHitwiseのブログによると、del.icio.usユーザーのプロファイルは「25-34歳/年収10-15万ドル/都市アップタウン、郊外エリート層」ということ。 [原文へ] del.icio.us [...]

By: cruncher

cruncher — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 02:24:33 +0000

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.

By: Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:27:53 +0000

I was only a little mad.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:23:39 +0000

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

By: foobar

foobar — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:21:58 +0000

Soaring… like the Hindenburg!

By: Nick Gavronsky

Nick Gavronsky — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:10:02 +0000

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…

By: Ian

Ian — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:43:00 +0000

“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.