What do you all think about the validity of Alexa rankings? Is it your opinion that the stats that they produce are an accurate representation of users, or is it likely a more techie demographic?
Would you use the stats for talking to potential online advertisers?
Thanks!
[quote=Paul Velleman]
-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study
Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.[/quote]
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...
But to answer your underlying question, if I had good Alexa stats, I would talk them up. You may as well talk about the most convincing data you have, while acknowledging that the data may not be definitive.
I know that my blog gets about half the traffic of my companies site but the corporate site is ranked 370,673 and my blog is ranked 395,487. I would think there would be more of a difference in the two sites ranking.
But if I compare several of our companies competitors sites the numbers seem to line up. The numbers also make sense as trend data for a single site. I know from monitoring my blog when there is a spike in traffic; Compete and Alexa show a spike in their rankings.
Because Alexa captures their information through a browser plugin you want to make sure that the set of people that visit each site are equally likely to have the plugin installed. If people that read hacker news are half as likely to install the Alexa Plugin then people that read the new york times then there would be variability in comparing those two site.
Another use is to extrapolate from 'known' numbers to an unknown site (say a competitor).
It helps to separate truth from bull, but it is definitely not an exact measurement. If someone is off by a factor of 10 then you're on solid ground to call bull, if it is a factor of 2 or less then it gets a lot harder.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...
At least as far as the data goes, maybe it's better for making comparisons.