Tech 4D

Last week, Fred Wilson wrote, in Whats wrong with Alexa that he isn’t sure Alexa can be trusted with anything.

I agree that there are some large inconsistencies with Alexa, but you can still get some useful information by cross-checking Alexa with Quantcast (or comScore if you can afford it). For instance, here’s a correlation of the two sites Fred talked about, digg and del.icio.us;

Table 1

Assume that quantcast is more accurate than alexa (I think there are good reasons). From Table 1, you can see that alexa overstates the importance of del.icio.us and mildly overstates digg.

Now lets look at some other sites:

Table 2

Based on Table 2, I would throw away the alexa results for mapquest, history.com, discovery.com and nationalgeographic but keep information from the others.

Based on these comparisons I think I can also infer something about the demographics of Alexa toolbar users: they are classic “early adopters”. It would be very interesting to make correlation of alexa to comScore or quantcast and then calculate whether alexa toolbar users are good predictors for success of a new web trend or property.

Conversely, you might use this effect to predict failure as well. Take a look at mapquest vs maps.google.com (this is really scary). A Yahoo press release quotes comScore Media Metrix saying that, as of April 07, mapquest traffic increased by 3% while google maps traffic increased by 49%. But look at the alexa chart for mapquest:

During that time mapquest suffered a 50% drop in alexa toolbar users. Unfortunately alexa doesn’t report on subdomains, so I can’t get data on maps.google.com, but if I could, I suspect I’d find a large jump in usage of google maps by alexa toobar users.

So this data tells me that the early adopters that used to be mapquest users are leaving in droves while at the same time mapquest is adding new users who aren’t early adopters. This isn’t a good trend for any web property. On the other hand, there is a huge difference between the quantcast ranking (174 vs 13) and mapquest numbers, so perhaps alexa toolbar users never liked mapquest and it is no big deal if a half of them leave in one year. Or maybe something else is going on?

I’m an early adopter (I started using google maps in Feb 2005 when someone had to tell you about it) and I’m sorry to say that I don’t use mapquest very much any more.

(Thanks to Matt Owens for helping me with the data)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 4:35 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.