As we are writing blogs I thought it could be interesting to look at how we measure website’s popularity. I did not imagine that it actually existed a lot of different ways to measure how popular a website or a blog is. I was being pretty naive because when I think about it now it is the core of business on the internet today. Measuring how many visitors or viewers a website has help measure the value of that website and the money that can be paid by advertisers.
Only on this website, they list 15 ways of measuring popularity!
The most popular “traffic ranking” today is called Alexa .
They do pretty interesting stats like measuring the number of people affected by the Internet Blackout in Egypt.
In order to measure the popularity of a website they measure what they call the Traffic rank:
What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.
Their method seems pretty good but there is a major bias as it measures only the traffic of people having the Alexa toolbar. However, they explain that they correct for potential biases like that one.
Another way of measuring a website popularity can be to measure how many comments it has. However, this is not very reliable as we can assume that most of the people have a “passive” behavior and view the website without writing anything. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the website, comments are not a relevant way to measure the number of viewers. Same with subscribers, someone can subscribed to a blog and never read it or read it everyday without being subscribed.
Even though it does not really measures what we want, so it is not really “valid”, it can measure something else, which is the interactivity of a website, or a blog, which a normal traffic ranking probably does not distinguish. This can be very interesting as well!