Measuring website popularity
I was recently asked by one of my computing teachers if I knew somewhere were you could see how popular a particular website was. I recommended Alexa, easily manipulated, but probably the most widely known about site providing estimates of traffic stats.
Obviously the different traffic estimation sites use different techniques to calculate traffic data for websites, so some variation in their results should be expected.
Here is a quick look at the popularity of what is, under normal circumstances, my most popular site - GameMaker Blog.
Alexa - #438,208, however the week average is higher at 332,014.
Compete.com estimates the number of unique visitors to a domain per month. For April their figure for GameMaker Blog is 658. This figure is far too low. Even if we are just counting visitors to the blog itself, the figure should be closer to 3,000 and that is excluding the much larger number of people who see the site through the GameMaker Affiliation Service.
Quantcast is a site I found relatively recently a couple of months ago. Unlike the other sites Quantcast provides much more detailed information about visitors to particular websites, based on the number of monthly US unique visitors. They give GameMaker Blog, at the time of writing, a rank of 622,506.
Tags: alexa, gamemaker blog, gma, tom cruse, web stats