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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

#61

Post by robryan »

axod wrote: post #58
gnaritas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even in the post they once again pander to the privacy freak out crowd by noting that google analytics include some js. Someone commented that it was nice that they mentioned this, and the author responded with "We know our customers well!" Sorry but that's ridiculous. Reddit is hard to monetize because it's full of anti consumerist adblock js-blocking privacy freaks.... And they seem to be encouraging it in their us…

Apart from the hardcore privacy crowd you would think they best way to advertise to these people is through text based targeted advertising. You have a mountain of comment data their to run algorithms across to decide which ads are most effective for each user.

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

#62

Post by axod »

wanderr wrote: post #60
axod wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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 hos…

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...

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

#63

Post by eli »

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

You'd also might be surprised at the difference in numbers between one javascript-based analytics package and another.

(For example, definitions one what constitutes a "visit" can vary)

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

#64

Post by 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.

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

#65

Post by axod »

robryan wrote: post #61
axod wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the post they once again pander to the privacy freak out crowd by noting that google analytics include some js. Someone commented that it was nice that they mentioned this, and the author responded with "We know our customers well!" Sorry but that's ridiculous. Reddit is hard to monetize because it's full of anti consumerist adblock js-blocking privacy freaks.... And they seem to be encouraging it in their us…

Apart from the hardcore privacy crowd you would think they best way to advertise to these people is through text based targeted advertising. You have a mountain of comment data their to run algorithms across to decide which ads are most effective for each user.

That'd work well. As long as you make it seem like they aren't adverts. Some people just hate ads and will not click on them, even if they're the most useful tailored special offer you can imagine.

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

#66

Post by mahmud »

aw3c2 wrote: post #59
mahmud wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a site of mine reddited; Google Analytics reported 74 uniques, Apache/AwStats reported 900+ uniques. Draw your own conclusions.

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

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?

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

#67

Post by commandar »

pavs wrote: post #55
commandar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah some guy paid $8 CPM for rickroll, reddit has a minimum of $20k per campaign. Here is a discussion on the ad: http://www.reddit.com/r/ads/comments/cpm2d/i_cant_believe_so...

Jesus, no wonder they can't make any money and are constantly serving up self-ads.

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

#68

Post by mrkurt »

axod wrote: post #62
wanderr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hos…

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..…

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.

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

#69

Post by gtt »

pavs wrote: post #34
hyperbovine wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IOW Selection Bias is the problem here.
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