BayToday.ca outranks Nugget.ca

BayToday.ca draws more Internet readers than Nugget.ca on Alexa.com's rankings of the world's highest-traffic websites.

BayToday’s positional ranking, based on a three-month average over the last three months, is 363,531 while Nugget.ca sits at 406,375 during that same time period. The information was as of today.

The number represents ranking and not hits or amount of readers, so the lower the figure, the higher the rank on the Alexa system.

Alexa is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.com that uses special software installed on millions of computers to monitor browsing habits.

Based on what it claims to be "the largest and most global sample of Internet usage available in the world," Alexa says that BayToday.ca has surpassed Nugget.ca to move into the top 400,000 web sites on the planet.

Most-visited
Alexa.com claims to conduct the world's largest web crawl, tracking more than 3 billion web pages in all languages.

Using browsing data collected from an installed base of more than 10 million Alexa toolbars, the company produces independent traffic rankings that indicate BayToday.ca is the most-visited local news web site in North Bay.

Alexa's rankings are based on a combination of page views and users (reach).

What's wrong with Alexa
On its website, Alexa discloses a number of inherent flaws in its methodology that could influence results.

For example, the company's toolbar works only with Internet Explorer browsers. That means that users of other browsers such as AOL/Netscape are under-represented.

BayToday.ca’s own data, produced by our traffic-analysis software, show that about 90 percent of our users have Internet Explorer browsers.

Another potential stroke against Alexa is the fact that people who download a given piece of free, rather-intrusive software do not necessarily provide a representative sample of all Internet users.

A third problem stems from differing rates of Alexa usage in different parts of the world. "To some extent the prominence of Korean sites among our top-ranked sites reflects known high rates of general Internet usage in South Korea, but there may also be a disproportionate number of Korean Alexa users," the company says.

Ranking presidential candidates
Despite its biases, Alexa has been used by major media organizations such as Forbes (to measure traffic to commercial websites for its marketing coverage) and Newsweek (to track the popularity of U.S. presidential candidates through their websites.)

Thank you to all our readers for help us achieve this accomplishment.