Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Wilson Internet Rocklin, CA
Aug 17, 2005, 08:25
"Is there a way to know in real time how many visitors come to a specific site, without help from that website? Let's say I want to know how many visitors come to the CNN website. Is there an external traffic monitor?" -- Dan Lavie
There are four ways to determine traffic. Three companies monitor traffic to websites and sell this information to their clients, though some information on the highest traffic sites is sometimes displayed for free. These companies are:
Press releases on their websites can often guide you to free published reports, as well as the comScore Media Metrix Top 50 Online Property Ranking. I googled the words "CNN" and "comScore" and quickly found three articles, one fairly recent. "The State of the News Media 2005," quotes traffic numbers from both monitoring companies for CNN and its two or three top competitors.
If the sites you need data for aren't featured in the press, you may have to purchase data from comScore or Nielsen//NetRatings. If you can't afford their data, you can get a relative idea of traffic to a site by using Alexa (www.alexa.com). This service, owned by Amazon, ranks websites on the basis of traffic, #1 being high. They don't tell you absolute numbers of unique visitors, however. For such an estimate, find the traffic rankings (in press releases, etc.) of the sites just above and below your site of interest in the Alexa ranking, and its relative traffic will be between those numbers.
