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Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

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Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#31

Post by TeHCrAzY »

petercooper wrote: post #25
pavs wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This logic would also apply to other tech blog and generally tech sites with tech-savvy users. Most of them, including Wired, Ars, Digg, slashdot are doing just fine. Digg has their own marketing/advertising team, unlike reddit. I think this makes the difference.

And not all forms of ads are blocked out by AdBlock type plugins/addons by default either, just the most onerous ones and those people can be bothered to manually add.

Just checked: adblock + easylist = no ads on reddit.

Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#32

Post by hyperbovine »

nirav wrote: post #27

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.

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.

Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#33

Post by robk »

aditya wrote: post #15

So, is Digg still 8x bigger as compete predicts? http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/ That would make Digg have 64MM uniques...

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2Cdigg.com&#3...

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

Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#34

Post by pavs »

hyperbovine wrote: post #32
nirav wrote: post #27

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.

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 t…

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.

Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#35

Post by pavs »

goatforce5 wrote: post #20

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

Or maybe quancast shouldn't publish traffic report of sites that they don't have direct access to?

How many analytic codes are you willing to put on your site?

Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#36

Post by commandar »

pavs wrote: post #6
alextingle wrote: post #4

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.

This logic would also apply to other tech blog and generally tech sites with tech-savvy users. Most of them, including Wired, Ars, Digg, slashdot are doing just fine. Digg has their own marketing/advertising team, unlike reddit. I think this makes the difference.

Digg is also smart about actually selling and placing ads compared to reddit. I've been checking out digg for the first time in years the last few days, and I was somewhat surprised to find that I actually kind of like the way digg does interstitial ads.

Reddit has one header ad and a couple of sidebar ads that are self-advertising more often than not.

(I will note for the record that this ad[1] spotted earlier today got a good laugh out of me. Somebody has used reddit's self-serve advertising to its fullest potential).

[1] http://img.skitch.com/20100716-jc2rdcbrfcq62c4aa2u4q6d3dq.pn...

Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#37

Post by nirav »

hyperbovine wrote: post #32
nirav wrote: post #27

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.

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 t…

Not so much into stats but isn't a good statistical sampling has to have a uniform distribution over population space like strata/demographics?

I wonder what their sample size is for 1.56 billion internet users (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+internet+users).

As a side note: Alexa is an Amazon.com company!, when did that happen?

Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#38

Post by c3o »

robk wrote: post #18

Google Trends for Websites seems to have the most directionally relevant graphs: 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 thou…

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?

Re: Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc

#40

Post by blantonl »

sh1mmer wrote: post #28
jorgeortiz85 wrote: post #19

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

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 p…

What is most interesting is to see the stats difference when you remove their tracking code from your "quantified" site.

I decided with my business to consolidate on google analytics, so I removed their code. It resulted in a HUGE drop in their traffic reports - about 20%. We went from 440K of unique visitors to 305K just after the changes, and google analytics shows (and our revenue shows) the exact opposite.

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