Mentions of the Guardian Alexa-based report on YouTube’s audience surpassing MySpace is all over the Internet, including Steve Rubel’s MicroPersuasion. But is it true? (Here’s the graph via Alexaholic)
As sarcasticly noted by ValleyWag:
Rock on, YouTube! The flavor-of-the-month video site recently overtook MySpace as one of the top 10 visited Internet sites, according to Alexa. (For those who have never heard of Alexa: It’s a ratings system based on a voluntarily installed toolbar mostly used by webmasters. Therefore it is TOTALLY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POPULATION AT LARGE.)
The Alexa bias on its data is well known among many Internet experts. Matt Cutts, well-known senior engineer at Google, noted on how his blog (read by many webmasters and search marketing folks) supposedly has 1/4 the traffic of Ask.com, which is obviously false.
Unfortunately, the Guardian article makes no note if Alexa corrected the data for any bias (particularly with its heavy webmaster audience).
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