Alexa's Make Believe Internet

Amazon’s Alexa traffic reporting service has little credibility left among people who follow traffic trends. Most analytics services, like Comscore, don’t measure small sites well, but they tend to get it right for the larger sites. Alexa seems to get everything wrong, no matter how large or small the site.

Example: In August Alexa said that YouTube passed Google itself in total page views. They were wrong, but their data continues to perpetuate this alternate reality.

Now, another embarrassing error. Alexa says that Facebook, on a steady growth curve for the last two years, now has a larger audience than MySpace. This isn’t as ridiculous as the YouTube/Google error, but it’s still way off. Comscore says that worldwide MySpace uniques are 109 million/month, whereas Facebook is at 86 million. Compete.com, which measures traffic using similar techniques as Alexa, stills says that MySpace is larger than Facebook.

Thanks for the tip Mark.