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Ask HN: Is there a way to get absolute numbers from Alexa stats?
2 points by nihaar on July 14, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment
I've been trying to find some way of determining actual uniques and pageviews for a given domain using Alexa's API. However, the data returned is relative to the number of Alexa toolbar users.

Since Alexa does not disclose the number of active toolbar users, is there a way to determine the absolute number of uniques and pageviews given Alexa's data on a domain?

WolframAlpha seems to be able to determine this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=daily+page+views+news.ycombinator.com . I've tried to determine how many Alexa toolbar users there are by using WolframAlpha's data on 10 domains at random but there seems to be a considerable variance (up to 500M), so it seems that they are using some non-linear formula to extrapolate daily page views from Alexa Stats.

Any suggestions or anyone done this before?



If you knew the actual traffic stats (by, say, owning the site) for a site that Alexa has traffic data for, you could use that to calculate a scaling factor to the Alexa data. That is, assuming that Alexa's toolbar users visit sites in the same distribution as the rest of the internet, which probably isn't true.




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