
Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc - vaksel
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-traffic.html
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nirav

      prefer to rate sites by their "percentage of total Internet traffic"
    

I can't help but wonder how ridiculous business model like Alexa's works in
reality, their source of data is not even scientifically relevant to measure
total internet traffic, and yet they manage to get attention from everyone?

I almost feel that I would be laughed at if I had this start up idea and went
to raise funding.

~~~
hyperbovine
It's weird, but as a stats guy, this makes total sense to me. They are
sampling a small (hopefully random) group of internet users in order to draw
conclusions about how the population at large behaves. It's no different than
a political poll. Just like political pollsters, they express their results in
relative terms to sidestep the much trickier issue of guessing N, the
population size. Hence pollsters do not try to estimate voter turnout, and
Alexa does not try to estimate how many people are online.

FWIW, the firms who are giving absolute viewer totals are (I'm pretty sure)
just taking this a step further by estimating the total number of people
online and multiplying. This is a way harder estimation problem, which
explains why the resulting numbers are all over the map. The Alexa data is not
any more worthless, just less ambitious.

~~~
pavs
Its different from political poll because it is not random. Its like looking
at internet usage pattern of Indian internet users and predicting the traffic
of Reddit, when most of the traffic of reddit comes from USA/EU/Canada.

And that's exactly whats happening, Alexa relies on people who install Alexa
toolbar and from what I remember reading most of Alexa users are from South-
east asia, or more precisely, from India.

This is so dubious, its not even funny.

~~~
penblue
They have rankings by nation in addition to the overalls. Their base is far
from a scientific sample, but I think they give better ballpark figures than
some give them credit for.

Their "what's hot" section often has stuff about wordpress and the like, so
there are obviously many webmasters. There is plenty of American Idol and all
that, also. I have no idea, but I'd guess they advertise the toolbar in
different places and maybe allow it to be bundled with screensavers or
whatever.

~~~
cookiecaper
I think that the only tech-savvy people that use Alexa toolbar are webmasters
who are trying to get their Alexa numbers up, basically.

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jbeda
FWIW, they don't include Google/DoubleClick AdPlanner numbers, but the appear
to be closer than the examples in the linked article.

[https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile#siteD...](https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile#siteDetails?identifier=www.reddit.com&lp=true)

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jorgeortiz85
I thought the whole point of Quantcast is that they can directly measure
traffic instead of trying to guess. They don't even charge for it:
<http://www.quantcast.com/info/publisher-overview>

~~~
sh1mmer
Which is fine, but if you have to do that for all the traffic analysis firms
you add lots of JavaScript beacons to your page, slowing it down a lot.

They need to start working with companies like Google to use Analytics as a
clearing house.

Then you get issues with what and how people are instrumenting. For example,
if you instrument a carrousel you'll get a lot of page "loads" which don't
necessarily correspond to page loads or ad impressions.

~~~
axod
quantcast tracking code is nice, small and fast.

By comparison, google tracking code is unfortunately _massive_. It sets a ton
of cookies, which are then sent with _every_ _single_ _request_ to your
server. Wasting bandwidth. It's worse if you have it on subdomains, since then
it'll set even more cookies, and send even more crap to your server _every_
_single_ _request_.

For a website with a large number of reloads, or ajax or comet, this can be a
complete killer.

~~~
wanderr
Quantcast has no asyncronous tracking. If their servers are running slow at
all, their javascript will block your site from loading, even if you have it
at the bottom.

I know this because it happened to us. We contacted them about it but they
have no solution,they don't seem to think it's a problem since "most of the
time" their servers are up and quite fast. Marketing requires the tracking, so
our solution is to host their javascript on our server and run a cron nightly
to redownload the code from their servers in the hopes that we'll never get so
far behind that the tracking stops working. So far, so good.

Google, on the other hand, offers an asyncronous, non-blocking solution. Much
better.

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axod
async tracking helps if the size of the download is large. In that case, a
small stub of js is loaded, execution continues, and the large payload is
downloaded async.

But the tracking code is small. It's not going to make much difference at all
IMHO (And anecdotally in my experience).

Async vs sync, you're still going to have a DNS lookup, and an initial GET
unless it's cached. Both can block your site from loading...

~~~
mrkurt
Google Analytics doesn't load any stubs for async tracking, it inlines an
array of "events to send" and then loads the entire GA script asynchronously.
Once it's done, it runs through the list of things to track.

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gyardley
Looks like Reddit's trying to sell brand advertising based off of their
comScore numbers, since they're running comScore's direct-measurement
JavaScript on their site and they didn't bother to mention comScore in this
post.

The point of this blog post is probably to lump the Nielsen figures the
agencies are using in with a bunch of services the agencies _know_ are jokes
(Alexa? get serious...) That way they can discredit Nielsen when they send
this post to the agencies, along with their much-better comScore numbers.

~~~
samd
In the comments they said that they started working with comScore about 5
months ago and are still waiting for a report, apparently comScore mangled
their first 3 months of data.

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alextingle
I suspect that the vast majority of Redditors use Ad-block or equivalent.
Reddit might get millions of page views, but if that doesn;t translate into
ad-impressions then they are effectively invisible to the money-people.

~~~
gnaritas
> I suspect that the vast majority of Redditors use Ad-block or equivalent.

I seriously doubt that.

~~~
mahmud
I had a site of mine reddited; Google Analytics reported 74 uniques,
Apache/AwStats reported 900+ uniques.

Draw your own conclusions.

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aw3c2
With so "few" visitors it would be worth manually going through the logs and
see if your interpretation is valid.

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mahmud
Look, I didn't want to be blunt for obvious reasons, but now that you ask, I
will give you a hint.

The reddit crowd is not exactly advertising friendly. What we got was direct
human traffic, and 92% of them were blocking javascript. The only bots we saw
were the first 10 hits, most of them familiar from our twitter links; shave 2%
for the bots, that still leaves you with 90% of the traffic that's worthless.

The reddit staff are aware of this; why else would they _thank_ you for not
using a NoScript or ad-block whenever you visit the site with js enabled?

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robk
Google Trends for Websites seems to have the most directionally relevant
graphs:
[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com&sa=N](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com&sa=N)

It isn't a direct comparison since Google tracks daily actives and their
Analytics data posted is monthly, but you can roughly estimate 375,000
uniques/day * 30 days to get roughly 11.2M visitors, which is within reason
for the monthly data they present via Analytics.

Note too that though both these sources are from Google, they are from
completely separate, ring-fenced portions of Google's corpus of site data.
Analytics data isn't used in Trends and vice versa.

~~~
c3o
In GA there's a setting to allow sharing of my data with other Google
products. If I check this, do they still not use that as a source for Trends?

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cjlars
The Alexa data implies 1.4 trillion global page views last month (430 million
reddit views / .03% global share). Or about 1k monthly pageviews per user for
1.47 bn global users. If Alexa is off by a factor of ten, like some of the
other companies are, that number would have to be 10k (too high) or 100 (too
low?). Maybe Alexa's the most accurate of the bunch.

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joshfraser
these numbers are easily gamed. the trick is to add some invisible iframes
that load up an empty page on your domain. you can fire them after the page
has loaded so it doesn't slow your site down. I know it works for compete and
i assume it works on other services too.

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goatforce5
Quantcast will tell everyone a lot more info if the reddit guys go here:
<http://www.quantcast.com/info/publisher-overview>

~~~
gyardley
Agencies don't take Quantcast as seriously as they take comScore, which is the
unmentioned product that Reddit's actually using to track traffic.

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aditya
So, is Digg still 8x bigger as compete predicts?

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/>

That would make Digg have 64MM uniques...

~~~
robk
[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2Cdigg.com...](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2Cdigg.com&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0)

Google Trends implies Digg to be about 2.3x the size of Reddit.

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Kilimanjaro
Somebody please explain ad cpm and stuff like that (complete noob)

For what I understand 400M pageviews = $400K a month just in ads (at just 1ct
per pageview)

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ericd
400M*.01 would actually be $4M

But basically CPM means cost per mille (thousand). I believe 1 cent per
pageview is absurdly high for most CPM banner ads, with the real amount being
closer to $.003. It all depends on how valuable a demographic you have (or mix
of demographics) in the eyes of the advertiser, though.

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vaksel
for those too lazy to click the link:

36.6mm Visits

8.1mm uniques

429mm pageviews

11.72 average pageviews

14.16 minutes on site

25.15% bounce rate

19.27% new visitors

~~~
awa
I think the major part of the story is that compete.com, quantcast, alexa,
nielson report a much smaller figure than numbers from google analytics

~~~
vaksel
i think everyone already knows that...well at least in the site owner
community...the shock is that they suck that much even for a top 300 site

~~~
gyardley
The degree of suck has nothing to do with the size of the site and everything
to do with the propensity of the site's audience to participate in market
research programs for a pittance.

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earl
If you quantify, your raw pv numbers are free to you and to everyone else. I
believe, but am not sure, that the privacy controls are granular enough to
allow you to display eg visitors but not pageviews to the world at large.

visit, eg, <http://quantcast.com/gawker.com> . Click the dropdown under "Daily
Traffic" and select people.

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naturalized
I call bullshit re: Alexa complaint! We have the same number of uniques
(although 2x less pageviews), and Alexa shows much lower rank for our site -
about 3,000. Their Alexa numbers are overly favorable (Alexa rank 147).

~~~
blantonl
I think the overall point is that the indirect method of monitoring is NOT
accurate.

Are you a quantified site? If not, then you basically proved reddit's point.

