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Ranked by Alexa

I keep on seeing references all over the place for mobile related sites that are ‘rated by Alexa’ or ‘ranked by Alexa as number whatever in the world.’

Since when did anyone care what the world’s Alexa toolbar users are visiting? That’s no objective measurement. Not in a billion years.

Case in point:

Metacafe, which launched in 2003, is the 80th biggest site in the world by Alexa and the fourth biggest video site in the UK market (exact stats for the US aren’t available).

From Mashable’s article on Metacafe.

This piece of text is totally 100% useless to me. What it does tell me is that Metacafe has some sort of issue about its statistics.

I just a had look at their site. It’s not the Mashable editorial to blame. They’re having to use what’s available.

So I checked the Metacafe site and saw that there’s definitely some sort of issue going on. Any company that sticks an Alexa graph on their about us page to show how good they are needs their head looked at.

What is relevant are page views, unique users and similar traffic statistics. As for fobbing the reader off with a “280 million video streams a month” statistic, how does that help me evaluate them as a global player?

Totally 100% annoying when people resort to Alexa graphs.

Anyway, this is worth a look http://www.metacafe.com/watch/170944/amazing_11_year_old/

1 COMMENT

  1. Hehe – I love the way you use the word “editorial” so close to “Mashable”. 🙂

    I always get called out when I mention Alexa, so I guess I should have learned by now. I always get Hitwise or Comscore where available, but I didn’t have them to hand in this case. (The “fourth biggest” stat does come from Hitwise – they just didn’t have any recent, publicly available stats for the US market). At least I didn’t post the Alexa charts. 😉

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