2009/4/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/4/21 Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com:
So far as I can tell from percentage breakdowns by country in Alexa, the Chinese go to hudong and zh.wikipedia.org equally often- virtually the same number of page hits. However, hudong ranks 112 and wikipedia.org ranks 66 in China, which tells you that a lot of people are reading the other languages more than Chinese.
I seriously doubt that Alexa rankings at all meaningful for Chinese page views. I'm not sure if it is still the case, but I seem to recall that at some point the Alexa toolbar was only available in English, that would explain why wikipedia.org does better - people that don't speak good English are more likely to use the Chinese sites and less likely to use the Alexa toolbar.
Alexa is a rough guide only - their userbase (I heard it was ~70,000 somewhere, but don't recall where - I see no number in the Wikipedia article) is large enough to provide a statistical sample, but has all sorts of obvious systemic biases in the sampling (IE-only, English-only, etc).
So we're #7 on Alexa, which indicates we're popular, but not a whole lot more!
(We're #4 on comScore because comScore aggregates different sites from the same company, but Alexa does it strictly by domain name, e.g. listing Google and YouTube separately.)
- d.