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?
Posted by at 3:13 PM in /
Comments on this entry:
Hi Otis,
I don't think anything "fishy" is happening here... Alexa results are always kinda misleading, as they don't track ALL the visitors to any site, but only the visitors that they can monitor via the Alexa Toolbar. So, while Sitemeter is showing actual visitors, Alexa's stats are only based on visitors with their own Toolbar installed
It's not so much that this is fishy, it's really not, it is just a little bizzare that by using two tools, both of which measure traffic, you get exactly opposite reports. Yes, I know Alexa gets its data only from those who use their toolbar, but that doesn't mean that its and Sitemeter's numbers should be "opposite".
Interesting. It's good to have both sources of data. When comparing two sites on Alexa it is important to compare apples to apples. Alexa's sample is skewed toward tech... so techcrunch gets a bump up, while lifehacker gets a bump down. If you compare techcrunch to boingboing, you have a better comparison.
Now here's the interesting thing. Thanks to this sitemeter stuff, I can get historical traffic graphs from both sitemeter and Alexa and overlay them. Alright, alexa skeptics, are you sitting down?
First, techcrunch on sitemeter overlaid with alexa graph
http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k41/alexainternet/techcrunch_trends.jpg
Now Lifehacker sitemeter overlaid with alexa graph
Now that's astounding! I didn't know they would be this good. The trends for each site are very well correlated. So, the real problem is that Alexa's data is not normalized to account for the population of users. But it is still an amazing source for this type of trend data.
http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k41/alexainternet/lifehacker_trends.jpg
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