Just how broken Alexa really is ? Totally

A couple of days back, I wrote a post discussing the web traffic stats of Startup Meme and predicting that the blog would reach 100,000 page views for the month of July, 2008. Little did I knew that we would actually achieve it within a week.

The average visits per day on the blog are now 7,398 with average page views per day reaching 12,340. See these stats live at Sitemeter. In addition to this, here are some additional facts.

• Check out the unique visits and page views per month for yourself over here. The graph is now going north, totally north. We believe that within a few days we would have average daily visits of 8,000+ and average daily page views of 15,000+.
• Our visits for the month of July are 62,191 and page views for the same time period are 106,007. You can also see these stats over here. We expect to get 150,000 visits and 250,000 page views in July.

However, we have witnessed something really strange during this time. While the traffic was increasing by leaps and bounds on Startup Meme, Alexa was showing a completely different picture. It was not showing the increase in traffic, in fact it was actually reporting a downward trend. Contrast this with the huge bulge that Alexa showed, it was actually a day when we received around 1,500 visitors. Funny but true, the situation is a classic case in point that Alexa is truly broken and need not be referred to and relied upon.

We have decided to stop referring to any Alexa stats and metrics in the future, and would actively pursue to educate our advertisers on the issue as well. So as to make this broken and decade old Goliath a history.

PS: If any one of you is interested in advertising on Startup Meme, check out our advertising page. We are offering the premium ad places for as low as $200/month which translates to around $1 CPM.