Following my post of yesterday, James Cridland has done some really interesting digging into the statistics from his Media UK site, which gets over 2m page-views a month. Since it’s his site, he knows what’s going on. He then compares what Google Analytics, Alexa and Compete claim is happening on the site.

He found some curious discrepancies, and concluded that

Compete is under-representing my traffic by over two-thirds – as well as demonstrably not following any trends in mediauk.com’s site traffic. The figures are almost entirely unrelated to my website’s traffic. This is bad. Are websites basing purchase decisions on Compete’s data? In which case, do I have a legal case against them?

We’ve not, yet, mentioned comScore. That’s a blog post for another day, I suspect: because there’s so much more there than meets the eye, it’s not funny.

And to think that investors and VCs base valuations on these numbers…