Why is Alexa Still Relevant?
One of the big mysteries of the Web is why Alexa remains a part of the measurement landscape. Apparently, Alexa is now reporting that YouTube is bigger than Google - a claim that Techcrunch, which has had a persnickety week so far, enthusiastically attacks.
For those who don’t know how Alexa operates, it gathers data from toolbars that people install on their browsers. If you don’t have Alexa installed, none of your Web traffic is counted. The idea, I guess, is the people who do use Alexa offer a fair representation of the Internet population. It’s the same theory that Nielsen has deployed for years to measure television viewership.
If you believe one monkey behaves like 10,000 others, Alexa’s methodology could be an effective measurement tool. But the Web is so big with so many different options, there’s no way Alexa’s results can be accurate enough to be taken seriously.
Nevertheless, Alexa continues to be cited as a traffic measurement source - mostly by people whose Web sites conveniently have a high rating. The good news is there’s growing competition in the measurement market with new services such as Quantcast and Compete battling for attention. Google is also getting more seriously with the purchase of MeasureMap, Urchin and Blogbeat.
The ugly truth is Web measurement is an art more than a science. One measurement service will tell you one thing while another will tell you something completely different. This is a huge problem for many advertisers who struggle to get a real handle on how much traffic a particular Web site attracts. This is likely why fixed-rate advertising or sponsorship will become more popular at the expense of CPM-based campaigns.
At some point, the Internet Advertising Bureau and some of the major online companies need to come up with an industry-wide standard to measure traffic. In the meantime, it will only be a positive development if Alexa begins to disappear from the landscape.
August 14th, 2007 at 8:54 am
[...] Mark Evans, Myblog and Forever geek are all reporting that Alexa is useless, that is pretty much so a given in [...]
August 14th, 2007 at 10:05 am
I always wonder why people become so preoccupied about their rank on such systems. The people who are popular aren’t wasting their time worrying about Alexa or PageRank, they are more interested in creating content and not in a proverbial pissing contest !
I don’t think that there should be a standard, more confusion ! That way I can maximise my potential while others worry about frivolous things
August 14th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Rank, traffic, etc. are just part of the blogosphere’s psyche.
For advertisers, getting an accurate view on a Web site’s traffic is an important part of their decision making process.
August 14th, 2007 at 11:08 am
True, but too many people I see get blinded by “the numbers” too early in the game and never get to the point of having a decent website that an advertiser could ever go for.
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Sorry but Alexa isn’t relevant at all! We have a site that has over 900 000 visits a month and Alexa shows that we only have 2000.
Plus our main traffic comes from the USA and Alexa is showing that our main traffic comes from Europe.
Alexa is over rated, not relevant and useless for professional webmasters.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
[...] right Alexa is crap. TechCrunch, Mark Evans, Myblog and Forever geek are all reporting that Alexa is useless, that is pretty much so a given in [...]