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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

This is absolute nonsense.

Alexa doesn't place POF anywhere near the top 100 US websites (they have it at 466, actually). Now, I'm not claiming that Alexa is the gold-standard for accuracy, but if you're truly a top-20 site, you're going to be so immense that nobody would confuse you for a top-500 site. It's like confusing an aircraft carrier for a tugboat.

For whatever it's worth, here's the Alexa 10-20:

10. AOL 11. Amazon.com 12. craiglist.org 13. Blogger.com 14. Go.com 15. CNN.com 16. ESPN.com 17. Photobucket 18. Microsoft.com 19. Comcast.net 20. Flickr.com

Tell me again how plentyoffish is larger than Flickr, Microsoft and CNN -- I have a bridge to sell you. It's nice.

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Read the fine print -- it's top sites by pageviews, which is a very different (and less meaningful) metric than top sites by unique visitors.

That same Alexa data you quote has POF at 168 in the US and 466 worldwide, with 21+ average pageviews/visit (Compete has them closer to 30). According to that same data, Flickr has ~9 PVs/visit, and CNN has ~3.5.

It's not inconceivable that with a few differences in the data between Hitwise and Alexa, you could come up with POF in the top 20. It just shows you how meaningless pageviews are as a metric of success or engagement.

Nice catch...didn't see that. He's definitely stretching to make the claim, if he's using percent of US page-views as his metic.

POF's page-view count per user is so absurdly high that you really have to wonder what he's doing to get it there. The other major dating sites (which have roughly the same modality of search-and-view) all have page-views/user of around 10-13. It's awfully suspicious that he's managed to double that number....

His site is so simple that if every action takes you to a new page it almost feels seamless. Most other sites make sure the convenience of taking you where you want in one click is accounted for, but for a site running off of AdSense, more pageviews = more potential clicks, so you can argue he's stretching it for the sake of chart rankings; I argue it's to maximize potential revenues.

Isn't it safe to say that Pageviews is a pretty terrible measure of engagement (especially when comparing sites)? Pageviews can be a measure of how ajaxy your site is as much as it's a metric of engagement.

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