Many Web 2.0 Traffic Numbers Seem Like Baloney

Today, Rafat Ali posted in his PaidContent.org newsletter that video site Break.com received $21 million in funding. Okay, seems a bit high but maybe it's true. He then went on to say that the site reports receiving 17 million unique visitors per month. 17 MILLION UNIQUE VISITORS. That caught my attention.

Thanks to a great article at eBizMBA.com I found the US traffic stats for the top web 2.0 sites on the web. The information was calculated by Compete, a recognized source for third-party web information:

1. Myspace: 68,000,000 monthly unique visitors
2. Wikipedia: 47,000,000 monthly unique visitors
3. YouTube: 44,000,000 monthly unique visitors
4. Facebook: 20,000,000 monthly unique visitors
5. Photobucket: 24,000,000 monthly unique visitors
6. digg: 22,000,000 monthly unique visitors
7. Craigslist: 21,000,000 monthly unique visitors
8. Topix: 20,000,000 monthly unique visitors
9. flickr: 18,000,000 monthly unique visitors
10. TypePad: 6,000,000 monthly unique visitors

Based on these numbers, it seems unlikely to me that Break.com had anywhere near the 17 million unique visitors per month reported in the article. I've never heard of the site, have you? How is it that a site we've never heard of is almost the same size as Facebook and 1/3 the size of YouTube. If it was that big, shouldn't it have raised much more than $21 million? YouTube was purchased for $1.5 billion.

Looking at these numbers made me curious. In total, these sites represent 290,000,000 unique visits. Nielsen NetRatings estimates the digital universe in the US is 66,000,000 people. This means:

• Everyone in the US would have to visit about 4.5 of these sites every month.
• Everyone in the US who uses the Internet would have to visit MySpace at least once per month.
• 1/3 of the US digital population would have to visit Digg.

Some of this seems unlikely. My Mother, Father, Sister, an In-laws use the Web and I know that none of them have ever visited MySpace or Facebook, or Digg. I've asked many of my tech literate friends about Digg and none of them know about it.

So, what's my point? The point is that I'd be highly skeptical about any numbers you see reported for sites on the Web. I believe many of them are highly inflated and that the methodologies of the different third-party reporting companies are not accurate or correlated. They might have some value as relative measures but even that may not be true.

If you're competing against these companies or starting a new venture, don't use these numbers as yardsticks of success. They are most likely being manipulated in ways we don't know and you might wrongly conclude your business isn't doing well when it is indeed move right along.