omg facebook traffic declines?!?!? not exactly
October 10, 2007 – 8:35 pmOm Malik, a rising Facebook hater (likely a reaction to the over the top lovefest that tends to invade the valley from time to time -even if in the long run the love fest is right it can be a little much), pens a dismissive post pointing to comscore’s september numbers. Here’s the graphic Om links to:
But unfortunately Om falls into the fallacy of a single source and even more importantly the fallacy of Comscore numbers. Anyone who has published a website knows that Comscore numbers aren’t that reliable. They woefully under report traffic and skew demographically compared to internal stats and user surveys. Since comscore relies on a downloaded app/toolbar they potentially have a skewed audience. Comscore is a far from perfect source.
But to keep things fair let’s compare comscore to the other toolbar web traffic guys - Alexa:
Unfortunately we’re still waiting for Quantcast and my buddy Dave Cancel’s former company - Compete to release their September numbers. And once I get a link to Dave Morin’s slides he showed at Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns conference - his graph for traffic shows no such decline.
2 Responses to “omg facebook traffic declines?!?!? not exactly”
wait - so you are saying comscore isn’t reliable but you are willing to accept compete, quantcast and alexa?
By Allen Stern on Oct 11, 2007
Now, now - the point is that to get all high and mighty based on a crappy comscore report when likely the other crappy sources show something different means no meaningful conclusion can be drawn. Om is baiting his Furby loving brethren - but before the meme gets started that the sky is falling, let’s make sure the sky is actually falling. Remember chicken little was hit by a nut not the sky
By todd on Oct 11, 2007