Why is Alexa Still Relevant?

One of the big mysteries of the Web is why Alexa remains a part of the measurement landscape. Apparently, Alexa is now reporting that YouTube is bigger than Google – a claim that Techcrunch, which has had a persnickety week so far, enthusiastically attacks.

For those who don’t know how Alexa operates, it gathers data from toolbars that people install on their browsers. If you don’t have Alexa installed, none of your Web traffic is counted. The idea, I guess, is the people who do use Alexa offer a fair representation of the Internet population. It’s the same theory that Nielsen has deployed for years to measure television viewership.

If you believe one monkey behaves like 10,000 others, Alexa’s methodology could be an effective measurement tool. But the Web is so big with so many different options, there’s no way Alexa’s results can be accurate enough to be taken seriously.

Nevertheless, Alexa continues to be cited as a traffic measurement source – mostly by people whose Web sites conveniently have a high rating. The good news is there’s growing competition in the measurement market with new services such as Quantcast and Compete battling for attention. Google is also getting more seriously with the purchase of MeasureMap, Urchin and Blogbeat.

The ugly truth is Web measurement is an art more than a science. One measurement service will tell you one thing while another will tell you something completely different. This is a huge problem for many advertisers who struggle to get a real handle on how much traffic a particular Web site attracts. This is likely why fixed-rate advertising or sponsorship will become more popular at the expense of CPM-based campaigns.

At some point, the Internet Advertising Bureau and some of the major online companies need to come up with an industry-wide standard to measure traffic. In the meantime, it will only be a positive development if Alexa begins to disappear from the landscape.