A Wider Net

I’m a fan of Alexa, but this article has some good points. Alexa is a great tool for looking at the relative activity of a website. You can look at trends dating back several years in terms of reach or rank, and even compare several sites on one graph. Buy any internet usage metric has to be used appropriately. If you’re looking for trends and comparisons about a website’s reach and rank, Alexa still makes good sense, but understanding how the data is gathered is key to understanding what conclusions you can draw.

Ironically, Alexa appears to be down as I write this article. I’m not sure what their problem is, but I hope they fix it soon.

If you manage to get it to load today, take a look at the articles on the front page. There’s a terrific explanation of the difficulty in measuring site traffic on the long tail, and a startling graph of traffic on YouTube that shows a flattening trend since the acquisition.