Nielson / Comscore traffic numbers vs. reality

If it wasn’t clear by now, I find discussing traffic numbers pretty passe and gauche (always have). Yes, Engadget is at or near the top of the heap in tech news — but as an editor, to me, that’s not really what’s important. The numbers are an effect — not a cause — of reputation, engagement, and doing as good a job as you possibly can.

Anyhow, Saul Hansell wrote up a piece on the high-flying performance of Engadget and other blogs at AOL — the only problem is that he used Nielson numbers to back it up. For those not in the know, professional traffic metrics business like Nielson and Comscore (and to a lesser extent Alexa, Compete, etc.) make use of panels and cross-sections to estimate traffic and usage relative to the rest of the internet. Unfortunately these panel-based metrics are not only notoriously inaccurate, but they’re also frequently passed off as cold, hard numbers (as in the case of the NY Times piece, as well as a follow-up bit by Silicon Alley Reporter).

Just how far off are the numbers? As it turns out, somewhere in the range of 6x! In February of this year, over 12 million unique readers visited Engadget (not including RSS users or Engadget Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish), and in January it was over 14m. (January is always tech news’s biggest month of the year, thanks to CES and Macworld.) As usual, I’m not going to get into page views, RSS readers, and all the other methods of measurement, but the bottom line is that — specific numbers aside — in the last year and a half we did, in fact, add more readers than any time in our history, and we’re continuing on a rate of acceleration that tends to astound even me!

P.S. -And no, Saul did not get in touch to fact-check this story. He also did not update his post despite an email I sent providing him the more accurate numbers. Go figure!

Update: Saul got in touch, turns out he didn’t receive my email. His take on the numbers is in comments. Thanks for clarifying, Saul!