Allen Stern of Center Networks asks the question "Who will be the first to sue Alexa?"

Alexa, oh Alexa, how you kill thee. I've written and spoken about Alexa since they began operations nearly a decade ago. I've watched agencies pitch advertising based on Alexa charts. There are still ad networks that use Alexa rankings as a baseline for pricing Web site advertising.

Considering how wrong Alexa is, I've wondered for a long time who would be the first one to sue Alexa for an incorrect ranking. For sites that drive revenue from advertising, an incorrect ranking can impact their direct ability to generate revenue.

He goes on to cite Compete.com and Google Trends as more accurate alternatives. 

A couple things here.  First I don't think Alexa is in danger of being sued because they are open about their process which means people know what they are getting in to when they check the site.  Beyond that I'd have to challenge his support of the other traffic measurement sites in that I've found them all to be pretty unreliable.

For those who don't know, I make a point of not checking statistics on my site so they won't skew what I post.  But every 6 months or so I take one day and pour over all the stats from the last 6 months just for curiosity's sake.

The last time I did I was downright shocked at just how inaccurate both Alexa and Compete.com were.  They seemed to pick up on very broad trends but other than that they were next to useless. 

Since then I've talked to other web masters who have confirmed those observations.  It seems everyone knows these sites don't work.

Yet what's amazing to me is that we continue to cite them.  Even though we all know the numbers are completely inaccurate.  I'm not playing holier than thou here, I've done it too. 

It seems we have such a human need to rank things in relation to each other that we're willing to treat any measure as authoritative even when we know those numbers are wrong.

If you think about it you'll realize we see this a lot on the web.  Sites like Rottentomatoes.com make a business out of creating pseudo authoritative rankings based on skewed information (rottentomatoes is a site that surveys movie reviewers to rank their approval of new films but being included seems to require little more than having a web site).

We're not talking about wisdom of the crowds here we're talking about wisdom of the randomly selected elite (be it random movie reviewers or an unknown algorithm).  Not surprisingly this method doesn't seem all that wise. 

But that brings us back to Alexa, a site that is known to be bogus but which people continue to cite.  It seems to me the problem isn't with Alexa it's with all of us who continue to fixate on comparison even though it holds little bearing.  Advertisers, readers, and others of importance don't really care how your blog ranks in comparison to those around you so maybe it's time we all followed their lead and put all these sites aside. 

Addendum: Todd Cochrane of GeekCentralNews points out an unintended side effect of this faulty data that I'd never considered before.

I have to admit I don't think a lot about Digg.  I subscribe to the tech feed but the site itself has almost become a utility to me.  Like the phone or electric company it just isn't something I'm really conscious of anymore.

But the news that Google might acquire Digg really put the site back in the forefront of my mind and had me thinking back to when Digg was the hot topic in the blogoshpere.  Remembering back to that time I couldn't help but ask...

"What ever happened to all the Digg vs. Slashdot debates?"

For those who don't remember, Digg vs. Slashdot was the topic to discuss a couple years ago.  At the time Digg, the young upstart, was just about to overtake Slashdot on the traffic front.  Here's a quote from January 2006 (courtesy of kottke.org)...

There's been lots of talk on the web lately about Digg being the new Slashdot. Two months ago, a Digg reader noted that according to Alexa, Digg's traffic was catching up to that of Slashdot, even though Slashdot has been around for several years and Digg is just over a year old. The brash newcomer vs. the reigning champ, an intriguing matchup.

A Techcrunch article from the same period provides this Alexa chart (Digg is the blue line). 

Now in the back of my mind I assumed Digg had overtaken Slashdot but that was the extent that I'd thought of it.  Now that I was thinking about it again I decided to look into the current numbers.  The results were pretty shocking to me (which is probably an understatement).  Here's the Alexa chart (based on reach) over the last verifiable 6 month period...

If you're missing it the Slashdot line is the one very close to the bottom.  Here's the chart from Compete.com for the last year...

Again showing that Slashdot has been decimated. 

I'm amazed the tables have turned this dramatically in just the last couple years.  Again, I think we all knew Digg had overtaken Slashdot but what's amazing is how Digg has utterly usurped the need for Slashdot in the first place. 

This article from the Guardian quotes Slashdot as having around 5.5 million users as of August 2006 while the Compete numbers put their 2008 user count at around 785,000.  Even accounting for the inaccuracies of sites like Alexa and Compete this is pretty damning.  They'd both have to be WAY off for it to make much difference. 

It would seem like the Internet as a whole has chosen the wisdom of the crowd over the wisdom of the Slashdot editors and there's little Slashdot can now do about it.  I can't say the outcome isn't deserved (Slashdot never really responded to the Digg threat) but I also can't help being a little saddened by how diminished Slashdot has become.

Beyond that I can't help but wonder if this is an indictment of experts in general or of just the Slashdot editors in particular.  I'll admit to thinking they were a bit out of touch by the beginning of 2006 and I think that might have a lot to do with Digg's quick ascension.  But has our society really reached the point where we simply have no interest in expert opinions anymore? 

I love Digg but I'm not sure following the crowd exclusively is a philosophy that's very wise...