Traffic stats via compete.com
October 22, 2008 in College Media, industry news
Apropos of nothing, I created this graph at compete.com comparing site traffic for five major daily college newspapers – one from the southwest, one from the west, one from the midwest, one from the southwest and one from the northeast. #
It’s a fun exercise, although there’s no telling how accurate the data is. Anyway, if you want to check out your site’s perceived traffic and how it stacks up against other college newspapers, check compete.com. #
For comparison, here’s a graph of dennews.com and northernstar.info. Notice the huge spike in traffic for the Northern Star after the campus shootings last year. #
Well, I don't know how compete.com compiles and it's statistics, and I can't speak for the other sites shown in that graph, but the line for dailypennsylvanian.com doesn't seem to correspond at all to our own google analytics data in either scale or shape.
Maybe the relative comparisons are accurate though, no way to know.
I'm always leary of these graphs as well. The only sure fire way to record accurate data is on the server hosting your website.
Something very similar to this website is http://www.alexa.com
Google also offers the bechmarking data, which doesn't specify an exact site, but a group or genre of websites for comparison data.