Compared to some of its competitors, however, some of StatCounter's data points seemed a bit off to us. StatCounter, for example, saw Google's U.S. market-share in January at over 80% (and down from a high of close to 85% last fall), while Hitwise reported 72% for January. StatCounter also sees Mac OSX as hovering around 4% worldwide, while Net Applications reports it at 9.6%. RWW readers, by the way, skew more heavily towards the Mac than the mainstream, as Google Analytics tells us that about 20% of you use Apple's OS.

For mobile operating systems, StatCounter reports that the iPhone is in a neck-and-neck race with the SymbianOS (about 35% each), while AdMob's global stats (PDF) saw Symbian as leading the race with 44% (32% for the iPhone).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats

One nice feature of StatCounter's tool is that it is updated 5 times a day. However, while this would be great if StatCounter was showing us data from specific sites, these frequent updates almost seem like overkill when it comes to the broad categories that the company currently tracks.

Given that there is no universal standard for how to measure these statistics, any of these numbers from any service have to be taken with a grain of salt. StatCounter gets its data from all the sites that use the service, and chances are that the types of sites where StatCounter is installed on inevitably skew the data in one way or another.

Overall, StatCounter is providing a valuable service with this new tool, but users will still have to compare the information from Global Stats with data from other services and draw their own conclusions about the validity of that data.

1. en.wikipedia.org
2. flickr.com
3. youtube.com
4. google.com
5. imdb.com
6. myspace.com
7. nytimes.com
8. apple.com
9. twitter.com
10. washingtonpost.com

The entire top 100 is listed here. Where the comparisons to Alexa and Google fall down is that ://URLFAN doesn't measure how many people visit a website, only how many blogs mention it. So the resulting ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media and in particular bloggers - which is still a relatively small proportion of the world. So although ://URLFAN states that "unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in our ranking system since we're using concrete data to generate the results", it's also fair to point out that the concrete data they're using is from a small subset of the population.

Still, we do think ://URLFAN is an interesting measure of influence. The social media users of this world are known to be highly influential when it comes to products, opinions and so on. So in that regard ://URLFAN's index is a decent measure of influence and therefore potentially valuable to marketers. We can see for example that Flickr and Twitter are being used a lot by influencers, which is good to know if you want to attract the attention of those people.

In terms of blogs, there are just under 10 independent ones that we counted in the top 100. ReadWriteWeb is one of them, in at #97.

Note: we noticed that many of the websites listed had a big jump in "positive mentions" in October-November, making us think that perhaps ://URLFAN's index increased markedly at that time.

Other independent blogs that make it to the top 100:

• techcrunch.com #25
• engadget.com #28
• boingboing.net #29
• huffingtonpost.com #32
• arstechnica.com #50
• lifehacker.com #63
• dailykos.com #82
• mashable.com #91

This is pretty good company to be in. It must be said too that there are a lot of mainstream newspaper websites in the list, so clearly 'old media' is still pretty influential!

But in recent years, that has changed. Alexa now faces competition from Compete, which launched a similar public service in 2006 (our coverage), and from Quantcast, which was founded in 2005. Both of those companies gather data from numerous outside sources and their rankings are generally seen as more accurate than Alexa's.

"In recent months we've heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest," wrote Alexa in the announcement of their rankings overhaul. Recent months? The inaccuracy of the toolbar-based rankings has been discussed for years, which is why we think this might be too little, too late for Alexa.

Beyond the problem of public perception, Alexa also still displays their data in non-standard ways. The hard-to-understand pageviews per million, reach per million, and rank are not easily compared to other data sources, which makes Alexa's information less useful than it could be, even if it is presumably now more accurate.

Historical data on Alexa is currently only available for the past 9 months while the company recalculates old data with its new ranking algorithm.