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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Think about the demographics of people who seek out and install the Quantcast/Compete/Alexa toolbar. Now look at the demographics of their respective Top N lists.

Now imagine a knitting community site that gets twice the traffic of StackOverflow. Would it appear in the Quantcast/Compete/Alexa Top 500?

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StackOverflow is a Quantcast Quantified site. This means it's traffic is directly measured with a tracking pixel on each of Stackoverflow's pages.

The problem is: Are all 499 sites above them measured the same way? And all the ones below?

The answer is no, of course. Most sites don't run the QC tracking pixel. That makes any ranking they give fairly questionable, in my mind.

case in point, we (http://minecraftforum.net & http://minecraftwiki.net) have 60m page views per month (as Stackoverflow does -- according to Joel) and we're nowhere near the top 500 according to QC.

The ranking is based on visitors, not page views. Based on the graphs posted a few weeks ago at http://imgur.com/a/haHHz, it looks like you have about 2.8 million unique visitors per month to SO's 8.6 million in Quantcast

This is uniques? Ah, that changes things then ha. Although none of those graphs there list our uniques (I don't think? Don't match the figures I have here and GA calls them "Uniques" explicitly, they're visitors in those graphs) we are definitely lower than the 8m SO has.

I checked, the graphs you linked are visits. As of today our visits is at just shy of 11,000,000.

Edit: Ah, you're right. I see, under "visitors". Yeah, that looks about right, we have closer to 3m uniques. So many different terms in stats :D I wonder what the value of uniques vs. page views is.

Uniques are what count for big ad campaigns. Well, mostly. Uniques get the campaigns which you then have to fulfill with pageviews.

Ravelry.com?

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