Read the fine print -- it's top sites by pageviews, which is a very different (and less meaningful) metric than top sites by unique visitors.
That same Alexa data you quote has POF at 168 in the US and 466 worldwide, with 21+ average pageviews/visit (Compete has them closer to 30). According to that same data, Flickr has ~9 PVs/visit, and CNN has ~3.5.
It's not inconceivable that with a few differences in the data between Hitwise and Alexa, you could come up with POF in the top 20. It just shows you how meaningless pageviews are as a metric of success or engagement.
Nice catch...didn't see that. He's definitely stretching to make the claim, if he's using percent of US page-views as his metic.
POF's page-view count per user is so absurdly high that you really have to wonder what he's doing to get it there. The other major dating sites (which have roughly the same modality of search-and-view) all have page-views/user of around 10-13. It's awfully suspicious that he's managed to double that number....
His site is so simple that if every action takes you to a new page it almost feels seamless. Most other sites make sure the convenience of taking you where you want in one click is accounted for, but for a site running off of AdSense, more pageviews = more potential clicks, so you can argue he's stretching it for the sake of chart rankings; I argue it's to maximize potential revenues.
Isn't it safe to say that Pageviews is a pretty terrible measure of engagement (especially when comparing sites)? Pageviews can be a measure of how ajaxy your site is as much as it's a metric of engagement.
That same Alexa data you quote has POF at 168 in the US and 466 worldwide, with 21+ average pageviews/visit (Compete has them closer to 30). According to that same data, Flickr has ~9 PVs/visit, and CNN has ~3.5.
It's not inconceivable that with a few differences in the data between Hitwise and Alexa, you could come up with POF in the top 20. It just shows you how meaningless pageviews are as a metric of success or engagement.