Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Google. Alexa Is Useless

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Monday, August 13th, 2007

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.

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