Peter Rip, one of the smarter guys in silicon valley, wrote a not-bad post about web 2.0. But he used a well noted slump in Alexa ratings to back up his point, dragging TechCrunch and GigaOm and Technorati into the fight by saying these sites have peaked in traffic and are all now on the decline.
By simply clicking on our traffic counter, which we provide on our home page, he could have seen that our traffic is up, way up, over the period he says it was declining. Our highest traffic day ever was last month, and there wasn’t any particularly great news that day. I imagine GigaOm and Technorati are also way up, as are most startups that I talk to.
But Rip didn’t click that link, he just pulled a classic blogger move, one that I use often: Ready, fire, aim.
The astounding thing is that Valleywag DID do the basic research, and corrected him. They even contacted Alexa and asked why the dip is happening, and got a believable answer.
It’s like the world is turned upside down.
Why people continue to base their assumptions/posts on Alexa’ stats? They arent accurate and arent reflecting the real statistic of a site, maybe an overall trend, but that’s all.
Well, Valleywag actually got it wrong: it compared Alexa Reach (which represents the number of unique visitors per day) with Techcrunch’s sitemeter pageview number.
Techcrunch’s pageviews from Alexa and pageviews from its sitemeter stats match quite well.
I put together some graphs to show that on my blog:
http://lifeisaventure.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/how-to-use-alexas-traffic-stats/