Puffy's Official vs Fansite Alexa Rankings

There’s a lot of controversy about how accurate Alexa’s internet traffic rankings are since only people who are using the Alexa toolbar are being counted. If Alexa users are representative of overall internet users then it should give a good estimate of how many people are visiting different websites. Unfortunately it’s unclear if this is so (Alexa of course says it is).

But since it’s free info I thought I’d do an internet traffic ranking comparison between Puffy’s official English site and my fansite Puffy AmiYumi World. Here’s what I got on December 5th, 2007:

Sites	puffyamiyumi.com	puffyamiyumiworld.com
Global	915,503	698,037
US	553,531	378,446
Japan	177,850	290,414
Mexico	160,630	150,221
Philippines	103,792	36,779

According to Alexa the fansite Puffy AmiYumi World actually gets more traffic than does Puffy’s official English site. One curious statistic (either real or a byproduct of which countries use Alexa and which aren’t) is that only 22.2% of the traffic at their official site comes from the US, 16.7% comes from Japan and the rest are spread out all over the world. By contrast 40% of visitors to Puffy AmiYumi World come from the US and 20% from Japan.

Puffy’s official Japanese site scored much higher with an overall traffic rating of 227,608. It placed at 12,851 in Japan while only 643,272 in the US. Since the site is in Japanese it not surprisingly received 87.3% of its traffic from Japan with only 4.5% from the US.