Contributed by: Editor on Tuesday, February 23 2010 @ 12:06 pm
Last modified on Wednesday, May 24 2023 @ 12:37 pm
I found an article which talks about the trouble with web traffic numbers. I have talked about this issue before but it is interesting to see it from the point for view of a large dating site like OkCupid. In January comScore reported that OKCupid had 735,000 unique visitors in January, 2010. This was an increase of about 200,000 from a year ago according to comScore. Sam Yagan, OKCupid chief executive stated that:
... comScore was significantly undercounting the site’s traffic.
For proof he gave the author of the article, Carl Bialik a Google Analytics report for OkCupid which showed almost 4.3 million unique visitors last month. This shows that comScore's estimate is off by 600 percent. All I can say is I am not surprised. Web traffic estimates from these types of traffic sites are usually way off the mark. For example our review site is vastly under estimated as well, in most cases over 4 times as much. The other statistic in which Sam Yagan mentioned was that during a normal day in February (Feb 18th I believe) they had 270,000 unique logins to their dating site. With almost a couple hundred thousand people logging in during a 24 hour period, this makes comScore's estimate of 735,000 unique visitors in a month seem laughably low.
Read more about this topic on the WSJ Blogs. To find out about this dating site, read our review of OKCupid.