On 15/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Look, Alexa is a hopeless indicator of traffic. It
only tracks people
with the Alexa toolbar installed, which is a very small and biased
portion of all internet users; for a start, it excludes all schools and
universities - because they're not going to have the Alexa toolbar
installed - which is presumably where a lot of our traffic comes from.
While it's hard to question that Alexa numbers are not very useful, I
don't know of another chart listing that anyone even uses or has heard
of, let alone that has better methodology. So until then, Alexa
ratings are what we have. Though I'm open to suggestions.
(It's like using Billboard ratings from the '70s and '80s for US
record sales - they were basically a lie, as mainstream radio play was
a vast component. So, e.g., "Planet Rock" could sell 750,000 copies
and not rate at all. I'm sure Alexa has similar egregious anomalies.)
- d.