Metricsmarket = Alexa?

It's beginning to look like that's where MM gets data from

[Macro]

I've made the odd post about metricsmarket myself.

Today something hit me! I've got fair amount of circumstantial evidence that it's using the Alexa rank and making an extrapolation from there.

Which is sad. I kinda held metricsmarket figures with a little more respect than I reserve for Alexa.

One piece of "evidence": Two years ago we had brandname.com redirecting to ourcompanysite.com. As far as Alexa is concerned those two sites had exactly the same rank. Then, two years ago, we setup brandname.com as a separate website and developed lots of links for it. Alexa still shows it at exactly the same rank as ourcomanysite.com. We've just gotten used to the fact that Alexa hardly ever updates anything other than site rank. Metricsmarket, however, does exactly the same thing. brandname.com gets substantially less traffic but metricsmarket ranks both sites with exactly the same traffic... I've been monitoring it for months now.

Further, when I artificially inflate my Alexa rank for one of the sites then the metricmarket estimate of traffic suddenly goes up. Have I hit on something new.... or has anyone else seen this?

[Macro]

<bump> Anyone?

Hey, I've made a big discovery guys ;) Someone say something....

[Receptional Andy]

I never came across Metricsmarket before, but certainly the stats seem remarkably Alexa-ish - plus I was interested to see that they are unable to estimate traffic to alexa.com (Alexa exclude their own site from the traffic stats) ;)

[Macro]

Thanks Andy. Well spotted!

[dataguy]

When I first came across MetricsMarket I was certain that their data did not match Alexa's. There are some very tell-tale signs of Alexa data, such as Alexa's quirky grouping of domain names that were once part of the same web site. I ran numerous tests over a few weeks and MM was much more accurate than Alexa.

That was in March. In the middle of May I noticed some of their data on my sites was pretty far off. I ran a few of my Alexa-grouped names and determined that they had started getting their info from Alexa.

I'm not an Alexa-basher like many others, but I sure would welcome more accurate data. Too bad.

If I had to speculate, since MM said they were seeking a US patent, I'd guess that they got into the patent process and found that someone else owned a supporting patent, forcing them to stop using their previous methodology.