July 23
The Problem with Alexa
Slashdot is running a story about what’s wrong with Alexa. The article focuses mainly around why it’s useless for slashdot, and other sites with a big tech following, but many of its points are applicable beyond the geek realm.
For example:
- Alexa only runs as an IE plugin, so in the US, that’s about 20% of users excluded. Overseas, it could be close to 50%!
- Many malware removal applications remove Alexa
- Alexa counts iframes weirdly – even worse, the methods they use for counting overall are not public, so the numbers may not be trustable at all.
- It doesn’t track https sites at all (like etrade, parts of ebay and amazon, etc)
Alexa obviously disproportionately ignores the technorati, but I think it also ignores a lot of the average users, too, such as those on Macs, or those that just run spyware removal applications.
The The Problem with Alexa by Molecular Voices, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Yuval Zukerman said on July 23rd, 2007
What is a bigger issue is the fact that other ranking and traffic services, like Cambridge’s own Compete (which pays users for spying on them) to market leader comScore NetMetrix – all do the same thing using toolbars and other similar tools.
Furthermore, these being American firms with relatively light global presence, they care more about US-based sites as well as English speaking populations. For real information, feet on the ground must be present, in at this point on Nielsen has those to provide credible information regarding sites on a national level.
In short, Alexa is awful; Compete is almost as awful. Nielsen at least knows what’s happening.
Paul Irish said on July 23rd, 2007
ComScore and Neilsen NetRatings seem to be the only leaders, however they’re not free, so their data isn’t as widely referenced.
As Neilsen just announced their dropping page views for time spent, ComScore is now standing looking very dated. This is the right direction, but these measurement companies still can’t account for the fact that information isn’t consumed on the website that created it. RSS feeds throw a huge wrench in the machine.
Don’t expect to have credible or accurate numbers anytime soon.
Mark Regan said on August 17th, 2008