Two Alternatives to Alexa

13 Sep, 2007

Two Alternatives to Alexa

Posted by: Rob Bluey In: Technology

Thanks to Patrick Ruffini, I stopped using Alexa about a month ago when comparing website traffic. My new favorites are Quantcast and Compete. Why? Here’s what Ruffini said:

Alexa is a flawed measuring tool because it‚Äôs self-selected. According to Alexa, Ron Paul is even bigger than Barack Obama online.

Quantcast and Compete are more reliable because they depend on panels, so a bunch of Diggers installing a toolbar won‚Äôt skew the numbers.

Unfortunately, John Hawkins used Alexa to compile his list of the “75 Most Popular Right-Of-Center Websites” today. I won’t put much stock in the list for that reason, but it’s still an interesting exercise on his part.

1 Response to "Two Alternatives to Alexa"

1 | Jonathan Rick

September 14th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

Just last week, I expressed the same thought: Alexa is unhelpful because it focuses on Alexa-specific “reaches” and “ranks,” rather than unique visitors.

By contrast, Compete, which calls its unique visitor count “people count,” is very helpful (I used Compete to create this chart comparing Drudge, Townhall, Free Republic and AFA: http://nostrawmen.blogspot.com/2007/09/most-trafficked-conservative-web-sites.html)

The problem is, everybody crunches its numbers differently. For instance, Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/redstate.com/?metric=uv) says Redstate gets 55,373 unique visitors a month, whereas Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/audience-search.jsp?domain=redstate.com) puts that number at 32,524.

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