Compete.com stats are often wrong. They say HN's traffic is down from last fall, and in fact it's sharply up.

That's interesting, do you know if theres a better alternative? Seems like it should really be something that should be fairly accurate, at least in terms of trends

FWIW, despite using Google Analytics, that Ad Planner shows exactly half of my true traffic (showing 110K pageviews vs 220K real). So I guess they're not working out the numbers from GA then..

I've just looked at the HN report, some if the dips in the report are insane, from 200k down to under 50k and back up to 200k in a month.

A lot of professional analysts use comScore but it's a paid service unfortunately.

Alexa.com seems to work quite well...

I like Google Trends much better than compete and alexa... to borrow a term - they have more bars in more places

http://trends.google.com

Only good for larger sites, as it doesn't cover smaller ones

Here is TC http://trends.google.com/websites?q=techcrunch.com&geo=a...

Here is HN http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com&...

PG - how accurate is it? Suggests ~20k daily uniques to ~50k now

Here are our actual numbers:

http://www.ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-2apr11.png

Pageviews are thrown off somewhat by crawlers, but unique ips shouldn't be.

Looks a bit like a seismograph readout. Are the troughs caused by weekends?

Yes; most sites' traffic looks like this.

Compete sucks big time. It shows the same for my site... when my traffic is x5 bigger then in March last year.

I just put my site into compete.com and the graph looked the same, with a drop off since august 2010, while our traffic has been steadily climbing.