Comments on: Numbers don’t joke

By: TechCrunch » Web 2.0 This Week (August 7-13)

TechCrunch » Web 2.0 This Week (August 7-13) — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 04:21:46 +0000

[...] Comments include “Clearly the data is way off” (see the comments to Fred’s post), “I donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t know what Comscore was thinking when they printed this data” (Jason Calcanis), “Jason Calacanis is having proper conniptions over the comScore marketing study on blogs released this week” (Jeff Jarvis – this is my personal favorite quote), “I know it galls Jason Calacanis that his sites are about as memorable as Burger King franchises, and that none register among the top blogs, except Pete Rojas’s Engadget” (Nick Denton) and “Chill out guys” (Fred Wilson in a follow up post). [...]

By: Bryan R.

Bryan R. — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19:14:37 +0000

Speaking of Alexa’s scoring system. It is far from accurate. However I have noticed that when my site reached the 100k mark (or thereabout), Alexa began crawling and updating more regularly. At this time I checked my server stats with Alexa’s stats, and they were oddly similar.

So, in closing, if you have 200k+ Alexa ranking, you can forget about even being updated regularly and this service will be useless for you. If you have 150k- ranking, then you should see a decent trend that follows your actual traffic.

This is my take. Someone else may have seen different results.

By: BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Measure this

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Measure this — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 12:16:47 +0000

[...] Well, they’ll never get enough knitters to measure the knitting bloggers. They can measure a few of the biggest bloggers. But that’s not what this medium is all about. It is about, as someone said at my Web 2.0 ad panel, the “big butt” attached to the fabled long tail of passionate niches that add up to a mass far bigger than the biggest bloggers. So we need to be able to add them up. [...]

By: none

none — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 04:08:56 +0000

Comscore is a joke, the only ones running comscores software are users that are to dumb to uninstall spyware. This is the main reason why slashdot is sooo under represented.

1. Major american banks will not allow a user infected with marketscore access their sites. This is because marketscore/comscore breaks encyption and reads all your passwords, creditcard info etc.

2. Marketscore is blocked by major universities across the united states. Read up on marketscore/comscore. Searching on google will quickly show you how to block and detect.

3. Marketscores infection rate that i’ve seen is about 1 in 5000 visitors. This number jumps wildly from industry to industry.

4. As for alexa is it just as bogus, you need 29 alexa surfers a day for a rank of 2000, you need 200/day to reach the top 400.

In short the numbers they come up with and use are completely bogus.

By: Pixy Misa

Pixy Misa — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 18:24:44 +0000

I installed the Alexa Toolbar – primarily so I could see my Alexa stats (currently #9,042, which is down a bit from last week).

Of course, I do 99.8% of my browsing in Firefox, and a substantial proportion of my readers also use Firefox, so… Shrug.

By: Karl

Karl — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 15:58:16 +0000

Jeff, I think you’re on the right track here.

So why the change in heart?

By: Jim Dermitt

Jim Dermitt — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 15:05:36 +0000

Do the Star Trek logs count?

By: Undertoad

Undertoad — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:18:35 +0000

I knew it. I toldjaso! sportsbybrooks.com? It’s not even a blog!

By: John

John — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:11:04 +0000

Alexa data is still determined by toolbar data… What’s more, according to the “About the Traffic Rankings” page on Alexa, you’re only seeing data for IE browser traffic, and Windows operating systems. Firefox could easily account for 10, 20, 30 or more percent of some sites’ traffic… and wouldn’t show up in Alexa.

By: Tish G

Tish G — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:48:08 +0000

Well, Jeff…just goes to show that as much as anybody wants to claim this is “new media” we are still stuck in the mindset of old media. Even the idea of Denton wanting to build an on line “media empire” is old media think. And that he’s doing it in the manner that Rupert Murdock did–by upping the hottie factor–says that using the old tools to build a media empire work just as well on line as they do in print. And that the even older way of skewing the stats can help too. I just love Calacanis’ chutzpah.

By: Jim Dermitt

Jim Dermitt — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:41:59 +0000

One more time to kill, one more time to feel. Whatever I do, it’s never enough.

By: Jim Dermitt

Jim Dermitt — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:21:18 +0000

Jeff, Maybe you can just use numbers to ID all of your posts.

By: Jim Dermitt

Jim Dermitt — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:11:03 +0000

Numb-ers and news. HEADLINE: A $50 Million Price Tag, and Still a Fixer-Upper? Welcome to the numberhood.

By: Jim Dermitt

Jim Dermitt — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:00:09 +0000

Numbers are serious. Just look at Mickey D’s. The sign says billions and billions served. So people see that and think, hmmm, must be a heck of a good burger we better stop and try one. The local guy has only seved thousands and thousands. You can’t get very far in the physical world or discover much worth discovery by limiting your reasoning to only the logical processes of arithmetic. Big numbers are impressive and everything counts in small amounts. A spider doesn’t do any calculations, it just builds webs based on random data and environmental conditions. The process is complex but it is not ruled by numbers. A spider ain’t digital folks.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:59:18 +0000

Cynical question: Has any business survey paid for by clients, ever shown those clients in less than the most glowing light? (I feel like I’m asking if a man has ever bitten a dog – maybe it’s happening somewhere, sometime, making news).

By: Noel Guinane

Noel Guinane — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:30:45 +0000

Nice try, Rick. Shame it looks like a beautiful bronze sculpture of Venus de Milo but smells as though it were cast in cow manure with a lick of gold paint quickly applied for surface sheen!

By: Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:17:56 +0000

Hi Jeff,
at Technorati we’ve always disclosed our methodology.
We count distinct links currently on the front page of a blog or feed for our rankings.
This means linking to the same blog multiple times counts once – one blog, one vote. As they move off the front page, they stop being counted.

By clicking on the little bubble icons, you can see the links we are counting.

I’m not claiming this method is perfect; there is certainly room to experiment with other techniques, but I do think it is transparent.