It Seem that Sean over at antezeta agrees with my rant on alexa the other night on stirkepoint, so here is his Rant

Dave,

I really liked your rant on Alexa on yesterday’s Strike Point podcast.
On one side, as Mikkel noted, Internet professionals thirst for publicly available Internet data. Yet afaik, none of the currently available data has any statistical validity. Even when we know better, as I’m sure Mikkel does, we fall for the siren song of dodgy numbers to do our benchmarking - numbers that in most cases cannot be trusted.

In the Italian market, Alexa’s data is often cited to say one site is more popular than another (which it is after all the company’s employees have installed the Alexa for IE toolbar) and, as with many things in Italy, since it comes from America, it must be right.

Right up there with my own Alexa pet peeve is the Nielsen//NetRatings nonsense. In the Italian market NN samples 0.038% of the Italian population - a small detail that never appears in their ever so precise sounding press releases.

I wouldn’t care so much if my customers and potential customers didn’t take this stuff so seriously.

After the n-esimo (umteempth?) explanation, I finally put pen to paper, or html as the case might be:

Part I: “Web statistics for internet market research: pick a number, any number”

http://www.antezeta.com/web-analytics/web-statistics.html

Part II: The suppliers (or liars?)

http://www.antezeta.com/web-analytics/web-statistics-suppliers.html

__________

Sean, I Agree Totally dude
DaveN