A Shame... Lia lost the AVN award

[captnjack]

Originally Posted by Natal

There is a web intelligence company called alexa.com, which gathers information using a toolbar (they claim to have millions out in cyberspace) installed on users computers. If you go to their site you can enter any address and get an idea of how much traffic that site gets. It isnt accurate in the sense that it doesnt capture traffic on computers without their toolbar (so there may be skewing between topics), but it does give you an order of magnitude estimate of how popular a site is.

I will have to disagree with your conclusion that this company’s results represent a site’s popularity. In order for a sample to represent the trend of its population the sample has to be randomly drawn. To say that there may be some skewing of the result is an understatement it is a given since this company’s data is bias (limited) to only users with this special toolbar. To extrapolate any trend this company has gathered onto the population as whole is statistically unsound. I will also speculate that all you are going to get from this site is some affiliates’ tracking cookie.

[Natal]

Originally Posted by captnjack

I will have to disagree with your conclusion that this company’s results represent a site’s popularity. In order for a sample to represent the trend of its population the sample has to be randomly drawn. To say that there may be some skewing of the result is an understatement it is a given since this company’s data is bias (limited) to only users with this special toolbar. To extrapolate any trend this company has gathered onto the population as whole is statistically unsound. I will also speculate that all you are going to get from this site is some affiliates’ tracking cookie.

Ya, I realize that, which is why I said it is skewed, especially when it comes to topics. Within a topic however (in this case porn sites in general), you could expect people with the toolbar installed to visit a variety of sites in that genre and it would reflect what they are doing over time. It wont give you absolute numbers (like actual subscriptions or anything like that) but it will give you an order of magnitude of general interest and how that is evolving over time.