In Alexa’s latest blog entries, they try to prove their ranking is worth more than a clothing store at a nudist camp by comparing their traffic trends to Sitemeter stats.
The above is the Sitemeter stats of Tech Crunch. Unlike other sites, TechCrunch makes their Sitemeter stats freely available for anyone to look at. The blue line is the Alexa traffic trend for the same period. Looks a like good match, doesn’t it?
My problem with Alexa isn’t with its traffic trend. My problem is with its ranking. For example, my blog has an Alexa ranking of 3,561, which happens to be better than the Alexa ranking for The TechZone (15,085). Based on those numbers, people looking at the two rankings would conclude that John Chow dot Com is bigger than The TechZone. I can assure you it’s not.
Advertising network like Text Link Ads and ReviewMe don’t look at Alexa traffic trends when setting their prices – they based it on the Alexa ranking. The Alexa ranking is all but worthless when trying to figure out a site’s traffic level.
Markus at Plenty Of Fish also took a jab at Alexa in his latest blog entry. He noted that Tech Crunch gets around 85,000 page views per day according to the Sitemeter stats. His dating site, Plenty Of Fish gets over 24 million page views per day. Markus’s one day Google Analytics is below.
On any given day, Plenty Of Fish has 260 times more page views than TechCrunch. Yet, when you look at the Alexa ranking for the two sites, you’ll see Plenty Of Fish at 643 and TechCrunch at 531.
I guess I shouldn’t really complain. After all, this blog’s super high Alexa ranking has enable it to charge $200 a month for a simple text link. 🙂