Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Google. Alexa Is Useless

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1. Kevin
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:07 pm

   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?

2. joe richey
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:10 pm

   Alexa has not worked right in many years. Its no where even right.
   I just recently discoved your blog and I love the finds you post.
   thanks Joe Richey
   http://www.wholesalerwholesaler.com

3. Jengeroo
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:14 pm

   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…

4. Andrew
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:16 pm

   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.

5. Andt Arnott
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:18 pm

   I would have to completely agree. Alexa is so 2001, compete.com is where it’s at…

6. RBA
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:22 pm

   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.

7. Wes
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:30 pm

   I think before its said to be useless, there is a need to compare more sites than just two.

8. Kevin L.
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:32 pm

   Darnit, remind me to stop using those Alexa graphs to show how awesome we are.

9. caroline
   

   August 13th, 2007 at 5:33 pm

   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.

10. Xavier VESPA
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 5:34 pm

    Haha, I agree on the Alexa statement. Can’t use the toolbar on my Mac. The headline is so stinging though.

11. nicko
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 5:42 pm

    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.

12. Alexa Rules
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 5:48 pm

    Would you, please, please not disclose the flaw in Alexa’s methodology. You will kill my text link pricing model.

    Signed-

    Text-Link-Ads

13. Jason M. Lemkin
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

    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.

14. Allen Stern
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    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.centernetworks.com/company/alexa

15. Facts
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    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.compete.com/help#snp2

    also Compete, Inc. has been around for 6 years, and raised over $40 million. Hardly a newcomer.

16. Freespace
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 5:56 pm

    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?

17. Colin Klinkert
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 6:02 pm

    I still use Alexa when looking at sites though, but def take the results with a grain of salt

18. Nerd Forum
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 6:04 pm

    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

19. Host a web meeting in the next 5 minutes for free
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 6:21 pm

    Alexa is unreliable. True

20. Marcelo Calbucci
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 6:30 pm

    Alexa is dangerous as I wrote in reference to the Seattle Startup Index on http://seattle20.sampasite.com.....-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

21. Narendra
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 6:50 pm

    Mike,

    Statsaholic has dumped alexa!

    http://www.statsaholic.com/about

22. Jeremy
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

    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.

23. Robert Seidman
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

    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.

24. Robert Seidman
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 6:56 pm

    that should have said: But 5 years ago Alexa was UNreliable and better than nothing.

25. Jimmy Huen
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 7:22 pm

    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.

26. Dave Jenkins
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 7:43 pm

    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.

27. Avinash
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 7:45 pm

    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.

28. 1daysports.com
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 7:47 pm

    Get Rid Of Alexa~~!!!!!!!

29. Satish
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 8:24 pm

    Amen, never liked Alexa rankings.

30. heri
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    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.

31. jcisio
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 8:38 pm

    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.

32. Thomas Crown
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 8:40 pm

    OK, now lets hope advertisers get it right this time. Stop using alexa to decide were to advertise!

33. Gideon Greenspan
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 8:42 pm

    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.

34. Keegy
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    Hey! you are in the wrong chart, This is the right chart http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....google.com that shows the relative position in Alexa Ranking, If you look inside published chart you are making a research about page views!

35. Rob Sandie
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    I believe that Quantcast’s model has it right. Hold the website accountable for reporting traffic, not people that install Alexa.

36. Peter
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 9:55 pm

    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.

37. analogstuff
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    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.

38. Inetgate
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 10:53 pm

    It seems that Alexa have a time to fight with Statsaholic, but they have not time to improve themselves.

39. Andy Fox
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 10:59 pm

    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.

40. Suraj Luke
    

    August 13th, 2007 at 11:54 pm

    Alexa is what we call Microsoft, and ComScore, Compete are the “Googles”

41. Mehdi
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 12:11 am

    Finally I got the proof
    Thanks a lot

42. LKozma
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 12:19 am

    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.

43. Lorenz Bogaert
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 12:22 am

    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?

44. Nicole Simon
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 1:23 am

    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://ivwonline.de/ausweisung2/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.

45. Jones
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 2:05 am

    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.

46. Stefan Kolle
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 2:08 am

    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…

47. Ali
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 2:09 am

    Compete.com only measures U.S traffic as do Quantcast and Comscore.

    In reality, they all suck!

48. Lowell Cremorne
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 2:17 am

    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…

49. d3bruts1d
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 2:51 am

    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.

50. Giovani Spagnolo
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 3:26 am

    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).

51. Dhiram
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 4:43 am

    More proof that Alexa sucks.

52. sylv3rblade
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 4:52 am

    It’s a shame that many web companies like text link ads rely on your Alexa rank.

53. Paul
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 6:09 am

    Alexa has always been pretty useless, but I can attest to it’s ‘value’ in the sale of my previous ecommerce venture. Personally, it’s a fun stat that I always take with a grain of salt. Investors, buyers, and advertisers on the other hand are still obsessive over it.

54. drwho
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:14 am

    maybe you are right and they are wrong…moron

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55. Deals and Coupons
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:28 am

    I knew something wasn’t right when Alexa required a toolbar to track site statistics.

56. esrun
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:31 am

    Well the problem is that it obviously comes down to how many visitors of the site actually use the alexa toolbar. So for example a technology based website might appear to be more popular simply because more of its users are likely to have the toolbar installed than say a website about dogs.

57. TuxRacer
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:33 am

    Yes alexa is biased: for ages they supported only IE!

58. Online TV
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:40 am

    Lol well maybe they’re basing off of servers, perhaps there comparing youtube.com to google.com (using ip addresses, and perhaps youtubes site resolves to one address, while google is split across it’s many data centers)..still this doesn’t make much sense.

59. Rhys
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:44 am

    I’m not so sure.

    Alexa - i think - ranks it’s data by traffic used. Google is simply a page with text and a few images and javascripts, youtube is mainly videos. Not sure on youtube’s compression scheme, but most the videos must be of a decent size (500kb+). You’d probably need 20-30 page views of google to get one small video on youtube.

60. John Smit
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:52 am

    A very interesting post!

    I think what we are all asking is, how is alexa actually coming up with these figures?

61. Shafi
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 8:04 am

    I like your post. I’ve always depended on Alexa rating for my websites but it’s clear from this article that Alexa is completely inaccurate for small or larger sites. What are the major alternatives that are more accurate??

    Shafi,
    http://www.lxpages.com/

62. Planet Malaysia
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 8:07 am

    Anyone installed Alexa toolbar? Not for me.

63. bboing
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 8:19 am

    The issue is not how inaccurate alexa is (which is a very boring issue for anyone that deals with internet). the question is why google usage has dropped with alexa users. more non-google search toolbars? yahoo/msn/ask gaining power? My guess - more toolbars and search assistants on an average alexa users pc.

64. Mong
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 8:30 am

    The way Alexa is favoring Youtube its not very far when Youtube will beat Yahoo! in Alexa

65. Jae
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 9:39 am

    Alexa metrics include non-us traffic. I don’t know much about comscore and compete, but I bet they collect U.S. centric data. This may account for the discrepancy. For example, Chinese users would go to google.cn, and maybe youtube.com. This boosts youtube.com’s pageviews, but not google.com’s. There would be a discrepancy if comscore and compete do not measure international traffic.

    See the percentage of users from the U.S. for youtube.com and google.com:
    http://alexa.com/data/details/.....outube.com
    http://alexa.com/data/details/.....google.com

    Google get’s 25% US traffic, YouTube gets 12.5%. These figures support the above claim.

66. patricia
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 9:49 am

    what’s worse is how many people think Alexa is accurate, particularly in advertising and marketing. I can’t stand sites like it. I think they should be shut down because they’re creating a lot of false hype and inaccuracy in the market, without users having a concrete understanding of how it all works.

    Just my .2. Analytics are obviously a sore spot. lol.

67. Warren
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 9:56 am

    What a worth while post. Thanks for all the facts and your counter-arguments, proving without a doubt that you’re are correct in your theory. Its just so obvious, youtube greater than google? UNPOSSIBLE!

    I mean how could we even think for a second that there could be a site more popular than google? That is total and utter blashmephy there. I mean I don’t know a single person who has even heard of youtube, or anybody who browses around there for hours. I often find myself getting lost in google results. I often just search for things just to search and I never leave that page. Its just so full of things to waste my time with.

    Thanks for once again confirming my beliefs that there is no fan boyism on the internets. And we can look at the tubes from up above and realize that google is in all of them.

68. patricia
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 10:01 am

    @ warren, you sound like the guy that thought paddleboats would never be replaced by steamships.

    never say never. i’m sure there could easily be a day when somebody else is larger than Google.

69. Dave
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 10:13 am

    Would everyone just click on my site above. You don’t have to oder or anything, I just want to double my counter and then get Google to refund my ad words! Thanks folks!

70. LeeAnn Prescott
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 10:15 am

    Mike,
    Anyone with any research knowledge has known this for years. The first questions you should ask of all research are “where do these numbers come from?” and then “Is this representative of the population?” Companies like Hitwise, Comscore, NetRatings, and even Compete go to great lengths to normalize their data and make sure it is statistically representative of the online population. That’s why their services are not (for the most part) free. Any data source (free or not) should always be questioned.

    Your tendency to sensationalize questionable data undermines your credibility, and this post further reveals your analytical skills to be second-rate. In order to make your writing more credible and informed, I recommend that you gain an understanding of data collection methodologies by spending some serious time with people from the measurement companies.

    When I met you over a year ago in reference to this post http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....echnorati/ and told you that Alexa was useless, you did not believe me. I’m glad you finally saw the light.

71. Ernesto
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 10:21 am

    Alexa is pretty accurate for sites with

72. Ernesto
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 10:27 am

    I think there’s a misunderstanding here. Comscore combines all the local google domains, and alexa compared google.com and youtube.com

    If you take a look at the alexa 100 you’ll see that there are >25 local google domains listed there. If you combine the data of all these domains you’ll get a difference similar to what Comscore reports.

    Not that inaccurate after all

73. Ed Kohler
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 11:01 am

    I wonder if Alexa’s numbers are skewed by embedded YouTube videos. That gives YouTube tremendous reach, but it’s not the same as surfing directly on YouTube.

74. Tanmay Bhide
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 11:07 am

    Garbage in… Garbage out…

75. Jae
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    Ed Kohler,

    Alexa’s numbers are not skewed by embedded YouTube videos. This is because the toolbar don’t make requests to Alexa for embedded media, AFAIK.

    For example, check out the firefox toolbar (http://www.alexa.com/site/download/). When I a website I’ll see the traffic graph for that website. I won’t see the traffic graph for an embedded video. This can be verified with a tool like tcpdump.

    Ernesto,

    my point exactly.

76. d3bruts1d
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 1:37 pm

    Again…

    How many times do we have to say that Alexa data is fucking pointless? We’ve been telling him that for years.? Why the fuck is this news?? Of course it is fucking useless. It isn’t a measure of real internet traffic…. is a measure how many idiots using the stupid Alexa toolbar visit a fucking site.

77. Tony
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 5:00 pm

    I wonder if Alexa gets fooled by advertisements on sites which make multiple requests, or if the amount of bandwidth served is affecting results also.

78. Shafner
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    I have a rather large male appendage. I wonder if Alexa could measure THAT accurately?

79. lucia
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 7:38 pm

    @LeeAnn Prescott

    I have to agree with you. Anyone with one iota of technical competence would suspect Alexa sucks the moment they learn how the data are collected (self -selected toolbars.)

    Anyone who owns two blogs in different niches has the data to discover the relative error in traffic detection is 4 orders of magnitude. My very simple comparison of a knitting blog to a “blog about blogging” blog suggest that on average Alexa is 20,000 times more likely to count an honest to goodness visit to a “blog about blogging” than an honest to goodness hit at a knitting blog. Discussion in Alexa: Only off by a factor of 20,000!?

    With errors this large, it’s hard to believe anyone with IT credentials would only now be discovering Alexa is useless.

80. Jon
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 9:06 pm

    Regardless of these numbers, I find it fascinating that a company that has existed less then a year and a half has sustained this amount of incredible growth… just makes you realize how precarious “global web positioning” really is if an unknown can possibly become bigger then the worlds most successful online conglomerate!

    Jon

81. David Mackey
    

    August 14th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

    Alexa is dead.

82. John
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 12:34 am

    Well Alexa’s ranking as stated by alexa itself is biased. It is based on a small percentage of a whole lot of internet surfers. But still alot of value is given to Alexa’s ranking by some VC’s and investors.

83. philip
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 1:46 am

    I will keep alexa because when i had problems with internet exployer and could not sighn on i used alexa sighned on and then sorted out my problems with internet exploer.Alexa was a godsent to me

84. Susan
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 2:26 am

    Amazing, although the problem is what John stated above, they are only based on a small percentage of internet users that happen to have downloaded the toolbar.

85. eiji joshiro
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 3:12 am

    Alexa doesnt proof anything so far but just simply put in ranking for website with uncertain data.

86. Traffic Slurp
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 6:32 am

    When a ‘tool’ show an un-natural number of SEO and web marketing related websites in it’s top lists, it shows that the tool is biased to only a certain specific user group.

    That being the group that are most interested in web traffic and the group that are most likely to download the toolbar…

    It’s not a true reflection of a site’s visitor numbers or web traffic at all.

    I’d bet the SAGA website isn’t on the list, but any crinkly who surfs the web will definitely go to the SAGA website. (How else does one obtain Rolling Stones concert tickets these days?) Why wouldn’t SAGA be listed? Because the crinklies probably won’t have downloaded the Alexa tool bar.

    Alexa has been nothing but a bit of fun for a number of years. Not worth the ‘paper’ that it’s written on. As one loo roll manufacturer used to put it in their telly adverts.

    ‘It’s soft, strong and thoroughly absorbant’

    Nice article, but this is nothing new.

87. Tino
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 6:36 am

    Alexa is going down!

88. Omadsense
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 7:02 am

    I like Alexa - visited Compete and it seems that it only works for the big guys… and you have to jion, how interesting….when do they start charging a fee????

    http://omadsense.com

89. Bogdan Gavrila
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 7:39 am

    1. Alexa might be right with all the linking people do for YouTube and with all the redirected traffic.

    2. Many people started to use the Internet only for YouTube. Many companies report that their employees are addicted to the website.

    3. The mainstream advertising (with the elections campaign) also influenced this rise.

90. Brian Carter, AdWords Consultant
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    Great post- I’ve heard of comscore, hadn’t heard of compete- I’ll look into those now, thanks!

    Brian

91. Erkko
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 11:50 am

    This single mistake by Alexa might end up costing them quite a lot. This article, 20 tracebacks, tracebacks to those blogs accounts to a lot of readers, and possibly people in the business of using these services.

92. Devrim Demirel
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 2:34 pm

    Maybe we are comparing apples and oranges here, Michael.

    Youtube is very popular worldwide and its popularity is increasing with an acceleration, and it has a single brand and domain for its worldwide operation.

    But Google operates with 157 different domains in the world. Google mostly redirects people to local web sites in their territories. All local google sites are listed seperately on Alexa: Google.com is #3, Google.FR is #24, BR is 25, UK is 27, and the list goes on. The Alexa Global 500 is full of Google web sites.

    It is not surprising that the pageviews per session average is better for Youtube, twice for a comparison between Google.com and Youtube.com, and mostly the same for international Google versions vs Youtube.

    All these combined, and many other parameters which would be easily added into the equation, the resulting data would show that Youtube has been a bigger source of traffic than Google.com.

    AdditSome simple maths would help to examine the big picture.

93. damu
    

    August 15th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

    liked the last comment of Devrim

94. Nishanthe
    

    August 16th, 2007 at 12:34 am

    Hey,
    recently I did a research on Most of the PR10 sites (Page Rank 10)..and compare them against Alexa and Compete. results are somewhat strange.
    http://www.vebguru.com/?p=86
    -Nish

95. rajaram
    

    August 16th, 2007 at 5:25 am

    Hi,
    I was using Alexa stats earlier. So i have to find a better alternative. Thanks Michael.

96. Dave Bulb
    

    August 16th, 2007 at 5:31 am

    I have to agree with the author. I think since Amzon bought Alexa it has steadly become irelevent and incorrect in measuring traffic.

97. SEO in China
    

    August 16th, 2007 at 5:43 am

    Everybody knows that Alexa is not accurate. But this doesn’t mean it has no value. It is still the easiest way to have a first picture of a site’s traffic.

98. Shams
    

    August 16th, 2007 at 8:39 am

    Look we all are talking about Alexa … why? Because there is simply no other alternative. With many I agree, installing alexa toolbar increases traffic rank. It`s not fair, but it`s like this. Google analytics, any log analyzer programs or your own calculation nothing are correct. It`s a combination of all!!

99. Chris McElroy aka NameCritic
    

    August 16th, 2007 at 10:39 am

    All SEO Tools, Link poularity checkers, search engine saturation checkers, and yes, the SEO guru’s bible, wordtracker also are useless by your standards.

    Overture doesn’t give great results either.

    No tool can accurately guage everything. You have to use them all and get an idea of how well you are doing and not believe you have a completely accurate assessment at any of them.

    Depending on tools and not your brain is not a good way to run a business.

100. Chris McElroy aka NameCritic
     

     August 16th, 2007 at 10:41 am

     Also, remind me again why we care to check google or youtube’s alexa ranking? Unfortunately I don’t own either of them nor are they my clients, so pretty much a “too much time on your hands” issue here?

101. Igor
     

     August 16th, 2007 at 12:33 pm

     … and what other services believe that there are any other countries in the world other than US and measure non-US traffic??? :)))))
     funny stuff….

102. Tamia
     

     August 18th, 2007 at 6:18 pm

     hi i enjoyed the read

103. BringTraffic
     

     August 20th, 2007 at 12:42 am

     Who cares what Alexa say’s, it’s accurate anyway!

104. BringTraffic
     

     August 20th, 2007 at 12:44 am

     Its not accurate, damn, there is no “Edit” here……

105. Jez
     

     August 21st, 2007 at 2:58 am

     Hi Micheal,

     You have got this badly wrong and here is why:

     http://www.sitelogic.co.uk/tec.....not-alexa/

     Sorry about the post title, I may tone that down a bit

106. Jamie
     

     August 21st, 2007 at 11:49 am

     The problem with Comscore is similar to Neilsen in that there are only a limited number of households being tracked to determine or extrapolate the supposedly viewing habits of the Internet as a whole. All these metrics have major limitations in their ability to track accurately what is going on across the Internet. You have to take them with a big grain of salt.

     In the end they are all a means of getting some idea of where people may or may not be spending their time online. Only the log files at a given website can truely tell you anything meaningful, and even then, trying to dicipher true unique visitors is black art at best.

107. mark
     

     August 24th, 2007 at 6:37 pm

     What a list of bs on the thread. Alexa is what Alexa is. They are useful in that you can see what the audience of people that have installed Alexa are doing. Alexa doesn’t say “this is what the world is doing”. Far from it, they are saying here is what the people using our toolbar are doing based on the measuring method we have put in place.

     Don’t like the report, don’t use it. Find it useful, use it. It is amazing you all spend this much effort bad mouthing it. Ridiculous. There is nothing to be gained by the slams.

     Much more useful would be inputs on other metrics that could be investigated to get different perspectives on what is going on, on the net.

108. Dom Einhorn
     

     August 25th, 2007 at 8:03 am

     With as many ways there are in faking (artificially inflating) Youtube traffic, that may have something to do with those numbers as well. In addition, a large majority of Youtube traffic consists of people uploading their (very often useless) creations and in managing those assets. Try running an ad campaign on youtube, or any other user-generated web site for that matter, and get ready for infinitesimal click through rates.

109. Frank
     

     August 27th, 2007 at 11:24 pm

     This explains a lot and confirms my worst fears.