Wednesday, 4 October 2006
TechCrunch vs. Lifehacker: Fishy Stats 
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Update: You can now digg this story.
Perhaps this post should really be titled "Alexa vs. Sitemeter", and TechCrunch + Lifehacker are just examples of the mismatch of Sitemeter and Alexa metrics, but...
When you think TechCrunch vs. Lifehacker, which site do you think has higher web traffic? I would guess TechCrunch, you?
To check my guess, I would go to Alexa or Alexaholic and I'd see a graph like the one below.
alexa website statistics by alexaholic
Excellent - I was right! But am I really right? Can we double-check Alexa? Luckily, both TechCrunch and Lifehacker track their traffic with Sitemeter (look at the right column on TechCrunch and at the very bottom of Lifehacker for links or just use these: Lifehacker , TechCrunch ). See anything funny? Sitemeter numbers for these two sites do not match Alexa at all! According to Alexa, TechCrunch is clearly ahead of Lifehacker. On the other hand, Sitemeter tells us that Lifehacker is about 4 times more visited than TechCrunch. Lifehacker gets about 218,000 page views per day, while TechCrunch has about 57,000. Lifehacker gets 165,000 visitors per day on average, and TechCrunch gets about 41,000 visits. Note that the numbers here don't include feed readership and feed accesses. Who can one trust here? Alexa? Sitemeter? Somebody else? Who do you trust?
Excellent - I was right! But am I really right? Can we double-check Alexa? Luckily, both TechCrunch and Lifehacker track their traffic with Sitemeter (look at the right column on TechCrunch and at the very bottom of Lifehacker for links or just use these: Lifehacker , TechCrunch ). See anything funny? Sitemeter numbers for these two sites do not match Alexa at all! According to Alexa, TechCrunch is clearly ahead of Lifehacker. On the other hand, Sitemeter tells us that Lifehacker is about 4 times more visited than TechCrunch. Lifehacker gets about 218,000 page views per day, while TechCrunch has about 57,000. Lifehacker gets 165,000 visitors per day on average, and TechCrunch gets about 41,000 visits. Note that the numbers here don't include feed readership and feed accesses. Who can one trust here? Alexa? Sitemeter? Somebody else? Who do you trust?
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