Hey Mike this is totally off topic but could you guys post up TechCrunch’s statistics?

It would be quite interesting to see how you guys have grown and how many unique views you are getting.

Just a thought

This is to do with how Alexa measures reach, So not only page views count but also unique. TC is ranked very high although it has only about 70K page views per month. This is because the 70K page views translate roughly to 70K unique in the TC case.

sorry meant to say 70K per day not per month

If you want to test orkut I can give you invitations: diego.polo@gmail.com

regards

Diego

Orkut has much better interface then MySpace.

I’ve been a passive user of Orkut for years, and it does have some attractive features, as #5 mentioned. It seems to me that Orkut has been successful in reaching the markets that other social networking sites haven’t, i.e. the Brazilians (at some point the whole network seemed to be in Portuguese), and lately Indian users have flocked in. I guess Alexa’s numbers at least for a part reflect real growth, it’s just in the markets we don’t usually hear much about.

I’m surprised to see that you actually think that Alexa ratings mean anything. They don’t. Alexa only rates sites where people use their toolbar.

Site1 could have a billion visitors and 2 of them used the Alexa toolbar, where Site2 could have ten visitors with all of them using the Alexa toolbar. This would cause Site2 to have a better traffic rating than Site1.

This means that only those people running IE + the Alexa toolbar or Firefox with an extension are counted. Opera, Safari, and everything else isn’t counted.

Yet more proof that Alexa is hardly the most reliable tool for assessing the popularity of a website. In fact, from my experience in the domaining industry, Alexa results are considered to be close to meaningless when evaluating the value of a domain name. As d3bruts1d correctly mentioned, whether or not the visitors have the Alexa toolbar installed often skews the results heavily in favour (or against) a particular site.

Have any of you just considered that Comscore stats are U.S. only? Come on guys, your country is not the only one in the world… I bet Orkut is growing steadily, maybe not THAT much, but certainly it’s doing well in quite a few countries other than yours.

^ agreeing with Ricardo Tohmé

Orkut is HUUUUGE in India and Brazil and those countries should be accounted for. There’s over 1 billion of us in India right now. ComScore doesn’t account for us.

I wish you would stop using Alexa stats which are pretty worthless (how many people have that stupid toolbar installed?) and the only reason MySpace has so many page views is because it takes 45 clicks just to check your new messages. Page views count for nothing except on sites with a good design where a new page view is an actual user looking at information on a new page.

Hei i have been using the orkut thz dayz
I just love orkut just becoz its superfast compared to myspace.
Its so simple to use tht anyone can start using from dayone

Hi All,
Any one can tell me how you people get these data from comscore as I went to there website to look for some other stats related to indian websites and consumer but i couldnt find.But in alexa i can get these data very easily.
So please tell me how you people get data from comscore.Do you pay for it?

Thanks…..Manish

I can’t even register at Orkut. I’m signing in with my google account as the form wants me to, then another form wants me to merge my (non-existant) Orkut account with my Google account. Clicking on “Don’t have an orkut account?” brings me to a help page, but nowhere I can sign up.
Returning to the home page of Orkut isn’t possible as well since the logo can’t be clicked etc., so who designed this bloody interface?! Don’t know why Orkut should get more views than anything else, especially MySpace, I see no reason.

@Christian Tietze

IIRC you have to be invited by a member of Orkut before you can join… then you’ll be able to merge it with your GAccount. I’ve not been there in ages, so I can’t say if that has changed or not.

Responding to 15

I can’t believe any site that is invite only can grow as fast as a site that allows signup from word of mouth/net etc.

As to Alexa toolbar. the assumption I assume is that a roughly equal % of peopel visiing any particular site have that toolbar - why would this not be true?

http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more

Read that if you have any questions about how the Alexa traffic rank works. It pretty well states that it is from Toolbar users only.

So the lesson to be learned here is, get your visitors to install the Alexa toolbar.

Seriously. If you want to get a higher Alexa ranking than your competitor, just put up a giant ad saying “Get their toolbar here”.

/me fires up dreamweaver

You people don’t get it.

Alexa operates on the same basis that Nielson pumps out numbers for TV viewers. It’s not COMPLETELY useless, it still gives a decent view of traffic based on the population pool.

Web analytics is a huge field, and unless everyone sends out their server logs to be analyzed no one gets it perfect.

I totally lost confidence in alexa data. It just doesn’t work, period. The site (www.gbaopan.com) I am working on has over 4 million unique visitors each month (according to google analytics), but it only ranks about 6000 on alexa. The thing is when my traffic goes up, the alexa goes the opposite way…. they really have some serious bugs to fix..

ComScore only count users from U.S.

Orkut have more than 40 millions users in Brazil, and that pageview (”5x the monthly page views of Orkut in a single day”) it’s just a big joke.

Impossible and inacurate.

@d3bruts1d:

The joining process of orkut is same it hasn’t change. Few other features has been added and this features are very good and helpful.
To join the orkut community you need an invitation from the existing member of the orkut community then only you will be able to merge it with your google account. Orkut is far better than MySpace.

Orkut has become very important in Brasil with almost all young professionals being members. The extreme importance of social ties in Brasil has made Orkut a necessity and sort of giant roladex in a form that I don’t see My Space as being used.

Another question about those social networking numbers–maybe I have underestimated their popularity, but the Myspace number calculates to 625 visits per person/month, and the Facebook numbers become 538 views per person/month. Who is checking their site more than 20x a day? And who is balancing a guy like me, who checks his Myspace once a week?

Comscore is USA only, alexa is world wide.

Check out orkut in Brazil and India. I suspect india may rank so high because of webmasters using it.

Alexa isn’t always reliable, but as a free tool, it can be used for relative comparisons (the actual quantitative data isn’t very reliable, such as exact rank). Yes, it only tracks people that use their toolbar, but if you compare one site to another, in most cases it’s useful. Remember, it’s international, Comscore is not.

Oh, and also remember Alexa is less accurate in the more niche areas of the web, like the sites mostly trafficked by people like us (Web 2.0 early adopters, if you want to call us that). We largely use Firefox or Safari, not IE, for the most part don’t install lame toolbars.

I like TagWorld. It’s great to see them in the mix.

I agree with Alaska….

Nothing will ever be perfect unless every site in the world uses the same metrics and analytics.

I always think of it this way…if you step on a broken scale that says that you are 200 lbs instead of 190 lbs and your goal is to loose weight and the numbers keep going down then you are doing your job. The same can be applied to your goal of growing traffic. If alexa says you get 1m uniques per month and you are really getting 1.5m but the next month you are trending higher than you are doing the right things.

I am really completely confused with this article. Orkut was always been and considered to be meaningless social site. I think Ryze is more important than Orkut. I would really be surprised to see it becoming player, but then MySpace was like that. So who knows. We are entering age of crappy sites.
If Orkut becomes success like it isn’t now, that would mean a lot for Google. I would prefer not as Google is really becoming too big and too faceless.
I would agree with what most people say about Alexa ratings, however in absense of other more precise data, this should do.

ComScore measures only for the US - Nobody in the US uses Orkut. That’s basically it.

Orkut is very widely used in India, Pakistan, Brazil and Iran. Each of those countries have ATLEAST 20 million users signed up on Orkut.

Until reading this article, I’d never heard of Orkut. But I do have a myspace page. Doesn’t everyone?

Shuki - exactly.

@ donny, if you’re new to social networking you would more than likely only know myspace - there are tons of sites. It just depends on the user - not everybody enjoys what they offer, some people cut their teeth on other networking platforms like chat rooms or message boards, etc.

It’s obvious that myspace is the biggest/highest traffic, but it’s also extremely noisy in the market - fox is throwing gobs of money into it, they have publicity firms churning it out - you hear about it half because everybody talks about it and half because myspace is talking about itself.

It doesn’t surprise me that people aren’t familiar with the overall market.

And to add, I too am not a big fan of Alexa - I think anybody who references it needs to point out its obvious flaws. It otherwise misleads.

as Mike B (#24) points out (by the way, I almost always agree with your posts), all the numbers on page views do seem overstated.

I am guessing that Alexa may have a quirk related to Google ads, but I need more info to make an intelligent statement.

^ I too like Mike B’s comments usually.

Great points!

This might have something to do with the design of the interface as well…MySpace design is ugly and uses no AJAX…Orkut on the other hand seems to be a whole lot better UI wise…

Check out my analysis of typical audience metrices at http://karmaweb.wordpress.com/.....ce-metric/

Alexa is so damn out of touch with the internet, it’s not even funny anymore.

Then again, everyone talking about MySpace user attrition is so out of touch with MySpace’s users it never even was funny…

^ Sam, what do you mean?

@ Scott, no, but I have a pretty big background in ecommerce with an emphasis on hosted solutions. It seems to me that they’re in the shareware/trialware space with capacity to build ecommerce. If you’re on a budget, maybe check out LaGarde (www.lagarde.com) - a lot of smaller retailers use their ecommerce platform.

^ also forrester (www.forrester.com) covers the space well - the analyst’s name is tamara something. maybe check their site for who they’re tracking in reports.

It will be interesting to see where Vox.com is in a few months.

MySpace is much stronger than I thought. It has become a part of the culture. I hope FOX can make the most of it.

^ well interactive participation online has become part of the culture, aka the internet as entertainment versus internet as information source. let’s not get crazy over here with myspace’s role.

I was in India a few months ago and was surprised to see how huge Orkut is in India.

So has anyone confirmed that Alexa’s numbers are worldwide and Comscore’s are US only? That would certainly be consistent with the discrepancy.

I don’t disagree with everyone that says that orkut has a better UI than myspace. In fact there a ton of less successful sites in the space that have a much better design and UI but the user base is what is dictating a lot of the components of the ugly UI in myspace so……

Patricia: Alexa has so few users that represent such an incomplete picture of the internet community that it really is an ineffective statistical measure many times. Contrast its real-world usefulness (spyware) with its real-world USE and it’s just unfortunate amazon hasn’t made baby steps towards fixing its little product there.

As for myspace news coverage being out of touch, I am speaking generally–whether it’s the WSJ, NYT, or michael arrington, most of the people writing about myspace facebook et al are representative of a non-primary demographic which doesn’t fully understand the hideous fickle teenage audience.

HOWEVER, I do acknowledge that MySpace has a very significant non-teenager demographic–teenagers aren’t essential to MySpace, not exactly at least. Moreso in the context of facebook. But in both instances the discrepancy between mainstream (or any) news coverage of these social networking sites frequented by young people, contrasted with the perceptions of the USERS, is often startling. I chewed out Robert Young over @ GigaOM about this a couple hours ago, actually. (http://gigaom.com/2006/11/01/sixapart-vox-facebook/#comment-320707)

The higher education marketing world is more attuned to this, in some sense, because they are keen to track their market. (I read up on all their stuff for my own site–Chronicle of Higher Ed, whatever) I’m not standing here predicting doom for myspace and everyone else, I’m just saying that too often these social networking sites are not considered in the context of their users, which is how they should always be seen.

Oh by the way one other note: Can we also remember that MySpace’s high pageviews are a testament to its horrible, horrible UI as well as its high uniques? You have to go through a stupid amount of pages to do anything on MySpace. This has been mentioned in the past but it’s easy to forget if you don’t use rupert murdoch’s little sideshow very frequently.

Orkut is an incredibly active community. I’m happy to send an invite to anyone who wants to check it out. jenboro@gmail.com

Michael,

With all due respect, you are doing our entire industry a disservice by posting misleading analysis like this.

I wouldn’t make such a strong statement if it weren’t the fifth time (that I have read) that you and your employees have made the same *exact* mistake.

The data that Alexa collects is WORLDWIDE.
The data that CommScore published is US ONLY.

Is it so hard to understand the concept that there are more people outside of the US than there are inside of it? And that as popular as MySpace is in the US, Orkut could *gasp* actually be MORE popular than MySpace in several other large countries?

I’m honestly baffled why such a simple concept is so frequently eviscerated here on TC. Unfortunately, the loyal readers digest your inaccurate analysis with aplomb, and “Alexa’s numbers are inaccurate” is the conclusion a lot of people draw.

It’s not MySpace’s UI. It’s not Alexa’s inaccuracies. The main explanation for this “contradiction” is that YOU ARE COMPARING APPLES TO ORANGES.

I was referring to this ajaxworld magazine article comparing blogger.com to myspace.com, using only alexa data: http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/267061.htm

critiqued pageviews in general, in the context of modern rss and ajax tech.

just for reference’s sake…

@ peter, no offense but alexa sucks.

WEB 2.0 VIRILITY MODEL

I have developed a model to strategically assess the virility of a web 2.0 concept / business model.

The reason web 2.0 has been so successful is the ability for people to share content. We typically credit social sharing for the virility of a website. After investigating, many successful, less successful, and unsuccessful web 2.0 website, I’ve developed a model to assess how viral a concept will be based on what is shared and how it is shared. This model operates holding everything else constant.

Read about my model at the Next Intuit blog.

http://www.nextintuit.com

for the record, the current (undated) demographics from orkut are below. it’s my personal impression that US-based early adopters have by-and-large long-since abandoned the site.

1. Brazil 62.30%
2. United States 14.17%
3. India 10.74%
4. Pakistan 1.74%
5. Iran 1.14%
6. United Kingdom 0.70%
7. Japan 0.52%
8. Portugal 0.45%
9. Canada 0.43%
10. Mexico 0.40%

@ Patricia, no offense, but so do all of the other ratings services. The degree to which they suck varies depending on what type of accuracy is important to you, however I haven’t found that on a large scale that any of them suck any more or less than the other.

^ agreed. i just read a good business week article about it. makes me wish i could find a solution - i bet a lot of people would invest in it

Hi, this article totally crosses a portion of a post I have worked on the last couple days and although I usually hate when people do this below is a link to the post. All I can say in defence of my actions are it is related and hopefully ads value to this conversation.

Orkut - the undiscovered country, or is it?

What about hi5.com?

Ref: the post from Eric above, here is another similar http://www.go2web20.net/
Seems Web2.0’s exponentials will be harder and harder to measure.

Social Networking is such a funny term. All of these “Social Networking” sites are nothing more than web based AOL’s.

It is genius really (well, that is obvious). Everyone always ripped on AOL…but when you call it by another name…

Orkut, Myspace, all of them…they are just crappy versions of AOL. It’s funny.

^ crappy, but free.

I really feel the need to second what peter said in 52. While alexa data might not be perfect using comscore, US only data, to compare international sites and draw any form of conclusion is very misleading journalism and not the kind of thing I expect from TC (and particularly Michael).

and the techcrunch community in orkut is:
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=22932071

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

I second Chris in that I cannot believe a highly respected site like TechCrunch is comparing US-only data with global data!

Comscore does measure international but those are not the numbers represented here. This is just for US I assume?

But I am curious as to why other sites, including Windows Live Spaces which has around 10M users according to Comscore, were not included in the post?

^^^ It is a little bit of a bizarre group here, for what it’s missing. … I think?

Good to see the comparison chart. Man one billion page views a day is an eye popping figure.

Talking abt myspace what jumps up to the forefront of my mind is the recent finding that a lot of phishing attacks are targeted at myspace. According to Kevin Beecroft of mashable labs there are almost 3000 phony pages there used for phishing purposes. With popularity comes people using these sites as a target be it yahoo or myspace. Recently one page that was used for phishing was spotted by myspace and taken off.

By the way if anyone interested in reading an article I recently wrote which covers all aspects of phishing attacks and how to protect onself from it you can read it at

http://infopowered.blogspot.co.....about.html

Now with all the phishing attacks even the most common net user has to stay guarded.

i’d be more inclined to believe that 3000 phony pages are created *an hour* than that there are 3000 total.

fyi, i think friendster probably does 1 billion monthly page views and tribe around 35-40 million with 1.4 m monthly uniques.

Replying to #52, 64, 67, and others:

Just to set the record straight, comScore does indeed observe traffic both globally and in the U.S.

Here are some related data for September 2006:

Worldwide Traffic (15+)
—————————–
MySpace — 78.3 million unique visitors
Orkut — 15.7 million unique visitors

Latin America
—————–
MySpace — 2.7 million unique visitors
Orkut — 10.3 million unique visitors

To clarify the last post, both worldwide and Latin America are observing unique visitors aged 15+.

Ok I know this post is kind of old but I was doing some research and find something very strange about your data. By Comsscore’s numbers Orkut gets 198M pageviews yet only has 351K users. This means that the “average” amount of pageviews an “average” single user goes thru per month is 564 pages. That is freaking obsurd considering the average pages per user average is 2.5 pages. Only way this data would be misqued is that Orkut makes 10 page requests per pageload but even at that rate still hard to imagine 564 pages per user.

Also Comscore only tracks USA users (a large portion of Orkut is foreign) on a Nielsen based system so they grossly under report. I tried Comscore once and knew for a fact I was getting 900k page views per month but by their “estimates” I was around 300k page views when 60% of my traffic is USA based.

Hopefully someone follows up besides me on this

Take it easy,
PK

i think that myspace is a cool website

Why do so few rounds-ups of social networking include Blackplanet.com? It has 2.5million uniques and 500million page views a month. according to Hitwise it is the 4th largest social network in the world!!

It was founded 7 years ago.

Yes, orkut is growing like anything, now its become symbol of social marking.

I agree with you orkut server down more then eight hour today.

Its interesting to see that Google owns orkut and is promoting all pages with its rankings extremely high. Its unclear even as we embark on the year 2009 what will become of even google with current stock price less than $300 today finally. With tough economic times its clear that social networking will be the speak easy of the 21st century. As people lose their jobs they will log on line and find peace in orkut or myspace.