While we can’t compete with PodShow’s 14000% growth over 2007 (and we also haven’t raised $20 million from investors), Compete.com says TPN grew by 430% during 2007. I don’t think Compete’s numbers are accurate – my own logs say we only doubled in size – but hey, Adam seems to accept their view of things, so who am I to argue? Although they also say only 20,000 people visited TPN in December which is obviously a completely bogus number. It was more like 500,000 according to our logs. They claim to calculate only US traffic but still, that’s most of TPN’s traffic. Compete strikes me like Alexa – pretty flaky.
As you can see, according to Alexa we actually went backwards in 2007. So Compete says we grew by 430%, Alexa says we went backwards, our own server logs say we grew by about 200%.
Compete are pretty accurate for us whereas alexa aren’t (not many educational institutions with the alexa toolbar 😉 and besides, it doesn’t work that great if you;re not a huuuge site). Probably the main thing to note though is alexa don’t do numbers, just %s… so you can have strong growth and remain pretty constant on there, relative to everything else.
It tells me that people with Alexa toolbars aren’t visiting TPN. Maybe not such a bad thing!! Or have a campaign to encourage the Alexa toolbar for TPN listeners and readers. I’ve seen that done before to skew the numbers in favour of a website.
Try this, “Hey, I’m using this great Alexa tool bar which gives me great stats on websites….” that should do the trick!!