The web metrics voodoo strikes
While defending Ning’s position on allowing porn and adult content, founder Marc Andreessen touches upon the flaws of current web metrics companies.
Fourth, bear in mind that you can’t believe any of the Internet measurement companies for any kind of accurate external analysis of Ning usage and traffic — or, for that matter, usage and traffic of any web site other than perhaps the very largest.
I’m talking about Compete, Quantcast, Alexa, and even Comscore — none of their data maps in any way to numbers or patterns we see in our own server logs and activity metrics.
This is a well-known problem in the Internet startup world and isn’t discussed often enough. It’s also a very complicated problem due to a whole hornet’s nest of issues, including toolbar adoption, demographic spreads, technology variations, international usage, and domain mapping.
Spot on Marc. When startup valuations are increasingly being determined by page views and other metrics, its time we start discussing this issue in more detail.
As an aside, in case you missed out - here are my recent posts on web metrics.
January 7th, 2008 at 12:16 am
I totally agree with Mark out here. The worst of all is Alexa. I mean c’mon how many of us internet users have Alexa toolbars? Their way of measuring Internet traffic is absolutely flawed and useless.
I have lost several advertising deals with small time advertisers coz’ my website http://www.goolti.com shows up somewhere in Oblivion on Alexa. They fail to see that in its sector it appears 3rd or 2nd on a google search!
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