Normalkid:Arnold Kim

Hitwise publishes stats comparing Gizmodo and Engadget — two of the most popular “gadget blogs”. The stats are interesting… with Engadget supposedly receiving 6x larger a share of visits than Gizmodo. By “visit”, I presume they mean unique visitor rather than page view based on how they describe the term later on.

On the surface, this surprised me, as I always felt Gizmodo and Engadget were of comparable size… but as with all 3rd party traffic data, you have to be suspicious about their methods of collection and how this might skew the result. Hitwise apparently draws from a pool of national Internet Service Providers (ISP) and generates traffic data based on this. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable method, but I still can’t wrap my head around the belief that Engadget draws 6x the visitors as Gizmodo.

Compete’s records show that they have roughly the same amount of traffic, but their methodology is also subject to error.

Fortunately, we do have direct traffic stats for Gizmodo that is directly measured which shows that Gizmodo draws 5,097,121 unique visitors from the U.S. in one month. If we assume this 6x the visitors stat holds true over a month, that means Engadget should be getting 30,000,000 uniques over a month.

To put that in perspective, that would make Engadget twice as large as Digg (whose stats we also have direct measurements) who “only” attracts ~15 million unique U.S. visitors a month. I don’t think that adds up, and while I have no solid proof, I don’t see how the 6x multiple could be accurate.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 6:28 pm and is filed under The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.