[Air-l] good source for web traffic data

[Chris Modzelewski]

Hi Cristian,

It depends on what countries you are looking for. For larger web sites 
in the United States and the United Kingdom, the most reliable I'm 
familiar with is data from Nielsen-Netratings or comScore 
(www.nielsen-netratings.com and www.comscore.com, respectively). They 
are commercial media measurement companies, and I'm not sure how easy it 
would be get the data you're looking for, but they might have it on 
their web sites or they may be able to provide some for academic 
research (not sure what their policies are on this front). In addition 
to traffic they would also have information describing the profiles of 
people who visit the web sites.

Nielsen-Netratings has much data on many European and Asian countries as 
well, but different countries may have other sources capable of 
providing far better information. For example, Gemius has extensive 
information about many Eastern European countries (www.gemius.com - by 
way of disclaimer: I am the founder & majority shareholder of Gemius in 
my day job ;-)), while AGOF has data about Germany and Audiweb has data 
about Italy (www.audiweb.it - whose data is actually provided by 
Nielsen-Netratings).

Many other countries have other organizations which collect & publish 
this kind of data. Many of these organizations have very detailed data, 
but will only publish (relatively) limited information on their web 
sites. Each organization may be willing to provide more information for 
academic research, but I'm sure each company has its own policies in 
that area.

Which countries are you interested in? I may be able to provide a more 
specific list if you narrow it down (unfortunately, I cannot think of a 
single "global" source that would be able to provide data that is 
equally-reliable across all parts of the world).

All the best,
Chris Modzelewski
Emerging Analysis Corporation / Gemius S.A.

Cristian Vaccari wrote:
> Hi,
> I am looking for a good on line source for web traffic data on individual sites (including, but not only, weblogs). As far as I know, there is www.alexa.com, which provides rankings and users estimates based on its toolbar's users. Does anyone know of a more reliable source? 
> Thanks,
> 
> Cristian Vaccari
> www.cristianvaccari.it
> www.comunicarepolitica.it
> 
> 
> 
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