

Ask HN: Is there a way to get absolute numbers from Alexa stats? - nihaar

I've been trying to find some way of determining actual uniques and pageviews for a given domain using Alexa's API. However, the data returned is relative to the number of Alexa toolbar users.<p>Since Alexa does not disclose the number of active toolbar users, is there a way to determine the absolute number of uniques and pageviews given Alexa's data on a domain?<p>WolframAlpha seems to be able to determine this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=daily+page+views+news.ycombinator.com . I've tried to determine how many Alexa toolbar users there are by using WolframAlpha's data on 10 domains at random but there seems to be a considerable variance (up to 500M), so it seems that they are using some non-linear formula to extrapolate daily page views from Alexa Stats.<p>Any suggestions or anyone done this before?
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scottyallen
If you knew the actual traffic stats (by, say, owning the site) for a site
that Alexa has traffic data for, you could use that to calculate a scaling
factor to the Alexa data. That is, assuming that Alexa's toolbar users visit
sites in the same distribution as the rest of the internet, which probably
isn't true.

