Web Traffic Rating Service Numbers Are Sooo Confusing!

[mandy]

Competing methods of measuring traffic online leave advertisers, investors, and even Net companies almost flying blind

Life is good for 27-year-old Seth J. Sternberg. A year ago, he dropped out of Stanford Business School to work full-time on Meebo Inc., an easy-to-use service that has solved one of instant messaging's nagging problems: the inability to communicate with people who use an IM service other than yours. Today Meebo is going gangbusters. It has raised $3.5 million from the Silicon Valley crème-de-la-crème, including Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame and venture capital heavyweight Sequoia Capital. More impressively, the service attracts almost a million people every day, who swap more than 60 million messages.

There's just one hitch: Sternberg and his co-founders have a hard time proving the site is as popular as they say it is. Look up Meebo's Web traffic using the comScore Networks Inc. service, and you'll find that a European competitor eBuddy.com is four times as big. Alexa, a competing Web measurement service owned by Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ), shows Meebo is bigger. Which is true? Probably neither...

full article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/con...a.rss1017t