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.centernetworks.com/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.compete.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://seattle20.sampasite.com/blog/Alexa-vs-Compete-vs-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.statsaholic.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.