We’ve gotten a few “tips” that YouTube has actually grown larger than Google in terms of page views according to Alexa.
This is, of course, complete fiction. And it shows just how useless Alexa has become as a method for measuring web traffic and reach. Comscore tells a much different (and more accurate) story – Google is nearing 100 billion monthly page views; YouTube sees around 16 billion.
Even newcomer Compete, which measures traffic in a similar way as Alexa, seems to be getting it right. Alexa needs an overhaul. It’s long since become less than useful.
For smaller sites it is understandable that Alexa may not have good data. But Google and YouTube are among the largest sites on the Internet. To get it this wrong is embarrassing.
Alexa was doomed when it required the toolbar for its statistics. It’s way too easy to manipulate, and honestly who do you know that uses it besides people looking to increase their alexa rank?
It is true that Alexa is unreliable and a lot of their reports have been misleading but there has been numerous instances where Comscore has been unreliable and totally off. Not a complete coverage of the issue though…
I wouldn’t say alexa is “useless.” If you want to know if a domain has significant traffic alexa will still answer the question in the right ballpark.
If someone is claiming their site is in the top 100 sites on the internet and alexa says zero traffic, something is up.
I would have to completely agree. Alexa is so 2001, compete.com is where it’s at…
I like the approach Quantcast.com uses.
And of course, I’m sure Google Analytics could tell its own story, but as usual, they keep it to themselves.
I think before its said to be useless, there is a need to compare more sites than just two.
Darnit, remind me to stop using those Alexa graphs to show how awesome we are.
Both Compete and Nielsen are an order of magnitude smaller than our actual numbers at our web service. Alexa is in the ballpark, with 10% less than actual.
Google Analytics gives the real picture, filtering out bots and stuff that doesn’t count. That’s what we show VC’s and advertisers. That’s what counts.
None of these “guestimation” services can really know, and it’s appalling how OFF Compete and Nielsen are.
Haha, I agree on the Alexa statement. Can’t use the toolbar on my Mac. The headline is so stinging though.
I recall about 5 years ago we were soon to launch a new site, it was live but no one knew about it. About 4 of us had the Alexa toolbar installed while working on the site, and before we told anyone about the site we had a ranking of around 75,000. It still annoys me when people quote Alexa numbers.
Would you, please, please not disclose the flaw in Alexa’s methodology. You will kill my text link pricing model.
Signed-
Text-Link-Ads
Alexa is very “useful” b/c it’s come back from the dead with a vengeance for lay folks who want to quickly diligence a site. Partners, VCs, even customers. It may be way off in many cases, but the fact is, it’s likely being used to diligence you anyway.
Amazon seems to have noticed with FF toolbar etc. Now it’s time to go to the next step and update the methodology.
Mike you are just realizing this now?
I have been saying this on CN since it began and for years before that. Agencies knew that if they brought in an Alexa chart, I would end the meeting immediately.
My last post is a bit of goodness – “never bring Alexa to a fight”:
http://www.cent...m/company/alexa
Mike,
Compete aggregates ISP, ASP, opt-in panel, AND toolbar data. Majority of the data is ISP data — natural as most of the volume is there.
For a comparison of Compete vs Alexa vs Comscore vs Hitwise — take a look at:
http://www.comp...e.com/help#snp2
also Compete, Inc. has been around for 6 years, and raised over $40 million. Hardly a newcomer.
I wouldn’t say Alexa is useless, like everything else you need comparisons between multiple sources. All companies have their way of measuring pageviews and if they all used the same method then you should see the same trend. Alexa is good to see if a site does indeed have traffic. What other free sources are their on the internet?
I still use Alexa when looking at sites though, but def take the results with a grain of salt
I agree in saying Alexa is useless. It’s a tricky business monitoring traffic, and Alexa might have been the way to go 5 years ago, but with such accurate statistics programs out there, Alexa is just about obsolete.
And besides, there’s no way YouTube could be bigger than Google. It probably uses a heck of a lot more bandwidth though…
-Chris
http://www.nerdcouncil.com
Alexa is unreliable. True
Alexa is dangerous as I wrote in reference to the Seattle Startup Index on http://seattle2...s-the-truth.htm
But besides that, here is an easy explanation to why Alexa is reporting YouTube having more traffic than Google…. And the story goes like this:
—
A few developers at Alexa are hoping to improve their stats. Lots of people have been complaining about the fact that Alexa doesn’t see AJAX/Flash calls, or that content inside IFrames are not properly accounted for (like in http://www.sampa.com), and so on. They go and they devise a brilliant plan (or, let’s say, some other major stats company did) thinking that PageViews are obsolete. “Yeah, we all know that, so we should throw PV under the bus and start over”, says one happy (yet younger) developer on the Alexa team.
So, the plan is infallible: Lets measure the time people spend on each site and use that as a proxy to our PV stats and that would take care of a lot of problems. They go and they implement this brilliant strategy and now YouTube appears to have 6 times more traffic in PV than it actually has, since people find things quickly on Google, but waste so much time in YouTube watching videos. But the Alexa UI team has been slow to replace the text “Page View” to some new term, like “Page Attention Span”
The End.
—-
Now, this is just a theory. Anyone cares to ping Alexa and figure it out?
-Marcelo Calbucci
http://marcelo.sampasite.com
The
Mike,
Statsaholic has dumped alexa!
http://www.stat...holic.com/about
Ever since we became the #3 site in our category, I’ve been waiting for people to realize that Alexa is worthless
There’s one competitor of ours that has less than 1/4th our members, has been covered here & elsewhere, raised millions of dollars, but has less than 25% of our traffic. At best.
However, Alexa has shown them ahead of us since before they actually launched their website…and to this day, with a million uniques / month, we can’t get ahead of those guys in Alexa. Sure compete & quantcast are light on the numbers, but all the 3rd party data providers are short of Google Analytics or other internal tools.
It’s just embarrassing how far *off* Alexa is…I really, really wish people would stop quoting them.
Alexa was always unreliable because of the type of people who would install it to begin with. But 5 years ago it was reliable and better than nothing, and nothing was all we had when it came to free data until Alexa. That’s no longer true. I’m with Max #6 — I too like the approach Quantcast is using to measure (you put a pixel on your web pages, they track it).
From a results point of view, besides loving all the info and how it’s displayed, Quantcast updates its data on a much more “recent” basis and you don’t get just a “monthly average” but get to see the intra-month results as well. It’s not one data point per month, but many. Given a little more time (it’s still very new) it could be very useful.
that should have said: But 5 years ago Alexa was UNreliable and better than nothing.
Until Alexa ranking is no longer the de facto site ranking number that Joe Schmoe CEO uses for his/her site mental order, I wouldn’t say it is completely worthless.
It just depends on your audience.
I wouldn’t be surprised if YouTube.com DOES have more page views than Google.com.
YouTube only had a .com site until very recently, when it rolled out 9 other TLDs in France, Spain, Brazil, Japan, etc. But those aren’t getting much traction. Basically, everyone in the world who uses YouTube, uses YouTube.com.
Google, however, has had more than a hundred country specific sites for a long time. And people use them. Germans go to Google.de, not Google.com. So, Alexa traffic for Google.com is only a fraction of worldwide traffic to Google.
When was Alexa a reliable tool for measuring traffic? I hate it since the day I came to know that my *private* site was under 1M. Please note that I never leaked the URL of the site. Later I realized that the traffic rank started going up since the day I installed the toolbar. What a waste of time!
I do find it amusing when I see people proudly showing “Alexa” badges on their sites.
Get Rid Of Alexa~~!!!!!!!
Amen, never liked Alexa rankings.
alexa works only with internet explorer – i am thinking alexa users are the same kind of internet users who download crapware and waste their time on youtube.
Hi,
I think the author misunderstands what compete tells. In the link it tells that’s VISITORS, not PAGE VIEWS. And Alexa never tells YouTube has more VISITS than Google.
OK, now lets hope advertisers get it right this time. Stop using alexa to decide were to advertise!
Alexa’s biggest problem is that it is massively biased towards the sort of people who install the Alexa toolbar. Any site which appeals in particular to early adopter types will be have its traffic hugely overestimated.
By looking at the statistics for several websites I run, which appeal to different types of user, I estimate this bias at around 50x. So Alexa’s statistics are worthless for anything more than a basic sniff test. Maybe it has some minimal value for comparing sites which compete directly for the exact same users.
Neither Compete nor QuantCast have this problem with bias. The absolute numbers they provide are far too low, but at least they’re in the right ball park for comparing sites on a relative basis.
Hey! you are in the wrong chart, This is the right chart http://www.alex...;url=google.com that shows the relative position in Alexa Ranking, If you look inside published chart you are making a research about page views!
I believe that Quantcast’s model has it right. Hold the website accountable for reporting traffic, not people that install Alexa.
Michael, you keep making the SAME MISTAKE. It’s embarrassing for me to see you make it so often, but there you go again.
Every time you post about a ratings service you fail to even look at what it’s measuring. Compete (hardly a newcomer, as noted above) measures U.S. TRAFFIC ONLY. ALEXA MEASURES GLOBAL TRAFFIC.
In other words, they can both be right! They are measuring DIFFERENT THINGS.
You don’t disclose what the comScore data is measuring. I’m pretty sure that in your mind, it doesn’t really matter since time and time again you’ve failed to see the difference between US-only, and global numbers.
The United States is certainly very important. But it is only *one* out of *over two hundred* countries on the planet.
Jeesh.
Even i dont think alexa is reliable. Most of the times when ever i received more traffic to my blog that day my alexa ranking would be more than what it would have been on less traffic day.
It seems that Alexa have a time to fight with Statsaholic, but they have not time to improve themselves.
Alexa is very often very wrong.
Quantcast is often very wrong.
Comscore ” ”
Compete ” ”
Even your own Google Analytics is often wrong (due to iframes, buttons on other sites, etc) .
@the person who said GA wont give up their info, I highly doubt yahoo, youtube, etc even use GA. Their traffic would choke GA, and they’d be fools to measure their traffic with a web based app. Thats just a dumb and paranoid comment.
So which is the best? None of them. And its a good thing too. I wouldn’t trust any ratings that come from one source.
Use a scientific approach, like most people do, and gather a little bit from each one and consider how they collect their data. Compile the data and trim here and add there and you’ll have a fairly clear picture.
Alexa is what we call Microsoft, and ComScore, Compete are the “Googles”
Finally I got the proof
Thanks a lot
Alexa measures all regional domains separately for google. These include google.com, .de, .fr, .ro, etc.
For YouTube, as far as I know, there’s only a global .com site. This way the comparison is between US Google users vs. global Youtube users, which might as well be realistic.
Compete is focused on the USA and Alexa offers a Global ranking. That’s the difference. Google has chosen to localize their domains in each country and has many sites with the google.* domain in the top-100. To name a few in the top-50: google.fr, google.co.uk, google.de, google.com.br, google.pl, google.es, google.cn, google.com.mx. For Youtube this localization does not exist and thus includes world wide traffic. I hope you’ll mention this in the post as it explains the difference.
PS: Am I wrong or is/was Compete a sponsor of Techcrunch?
If you want to look at numbers for a very certain demographic which is highly likely to install the toolbar and surf with it, then you can go for it.
But other than that Alexa numbers are like fast food: Easy and they make you believe they are ‘good food’ when in fact they are junk.
If you ‘believe’ in how alexa traffic monitors ‘global’ traffic, get yourself some compareable data. Suggestion for Germany:
IVW are the numbers for done for reach of online and offline media through various mechanisms and the ones I trust (http://ivwonlin...ng2/suchen2.php).
Sure they do not count ajaxy stuff, but get some numbers from their listing for German sites and compare them of your so called global Alexxa numbers which claims to have a German ‘ranking’ plus to other data and you will see the difference.
You’re comparing Google.com (US) against YouTube.com (worldwide).
The vast majority of Google users outside of the US use Google.co.uk, .de. .fr, .co.in, .com.au etc.
I’m no huge advocate of Alexa, but I think the Alexa stats area accurate in this case – but they don’t mean YouTube is bigger than Google at all – only that it is bigger than Google.COM, which is entirely believable.
After the initial excitement of making it into top 75 very quickly after launching our blog, I realised how skewed the results where.
And over the past year, according to Alexa we lost half our traffic – while we actually grew tenfold…. Compete on the other hand shows us doubling every month – which, alas, isnt true either
For smaller blogs like ours none of the above really shows the full picture. We have about 1000 uniques per day, but 5000 RSS readers per day – and those show up in none of these services. And I have no idea whether that’s 1000 people checking their feed 5 times a day, or 10.000 every other day.
So even I as the sitemanager havent really got a clue how many readers I have exactly. I guess I cant expect it from any outside service…
Compete.com only measures U.S traffic as do Quantcast and Comscore.
In reality, they all suck!
My site has been running for 9 months with good growth in page views / unique visits over that time – yet my Alexa ranking drops further and further. Say no more…
Haven’t many, many other TC readers been trying to tell you for years that Alexa data is useless? — You can throw Comscore in there as well.
Yet, for some reason you kep wanting to use both.
Wake up! Pageview metrics is no more a reliable way to measure web traffic. Instead, I think the next reliable metrics in today’s AJAX era is the average time a user stays with the focus on your page (and browsers could implement this for each individual user, by controlling each TABS, uploading to a central and *OPEN* statistics portal).
Do you reckon any web ranking website to offer average time spent on a page?
More proof that Alexa sucks.