I was making a presentation to the news team at Estates Gazette on Friday and as part of the story I pulled off a series of traffic graphs from Alexa to show the relative share of voice of traditional newspapers (The Guadian and New York Times), aggregators (Digg), social networking sites (Facebook) and video (YouTube).
The general story is predictable and well illustrated by the Alexa charts (check it out: one, two, three, four, five – see what I mean?) but the interesting back story is: what has happened to Digg? The site has enjoyed uninterupted growth until June and then has fallen to one third of its relative popularity. I checked out competitors, and the only one making inroads seems to be Mixx – and it’s growth doesn’t explain the fall. Any ideas?
BTW credit to the idea of comparing in this way goes to my colleague Karl.
I think that this illustrates issues with Alexa, perhaps more than issues with Digg. I’m unconvinced by the accuracy or quality of Alexa (I’m not the only one:http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/a-word-about-metrics-part-ii/, http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-publishing/alexa-from-a-to-z-the-rise-and-falter-of-a-web-pioneer-002694.php
Compete (equally invalid as a guarentee of quality suggests different behaviour to Alexa (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+guardian.co.uk+facebook.com/?metric=uv).
Anything like Alexa that largely relies on an opt in to gather data (e.g a toolbar)) is going to have skewed results. But, unfortunately, there’s nothing much better out there yet.
I appreciate the long-standing arguments against Alexa (and others) but 1.broadly all similar sites of similar characteristics should suffer the same biases and thus the relative judgement should still stand and 2. Compete is measuring only US traffic, which suggests that the problem may be elsewhere?