Do you ever wonder how popular a web site is? The truth is, there is not a single source where you can find completely accurate traffic rankings for web sites. Each web site can have very detailed traffic logs but no one releases this information to a third party for analysis.
So, people have to guess how popular a web site is in comparison to another. One way is to track stats for people who have a certain toolbar installed. The Alexa toolbar for example has such functionality. The people at Alexa then analyze the stats sent back by all the Alexa toolbar users to generate traffic rankings. As you might imagine, there is nothing statistically relevant about the results. The results only represent what web sites Alexa toolbar users visiting. The sample size is probably too low to fairly represent what the rest of the surfing world is doing.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how web sites stack up against each other, even if it’s within this small sample of users. For example, this web site is the 4 046 746th most popular web site among Alexa toolbar users (at least at the time of this post). I’ve dropped about 606 000 spots over the last three months, meaning at one time, I had the 3 400 000th most popular web site. Damn, time to put more nudity on the site!
Of course, these stats should all be taken with a large grain of salt. Feel free to see how popular some of your own favourite sites are.