On the subject of Alexa's usefulness: I agree with pclips that it has many powerful uses, one of which is to get a broad sense of how traffic moves across the, um, webcomicosphere (a word which I hate, even though I just, as far as I know, coined it). I've been doing a lot of data mining, as has Rob, I think, in precisely this way. But when it comes to ranking individual comics against one another in a chart, the problems seem more difficult to justify, to me, than they do to Rob. Here are some more (and I'm focusing on WCN comics not out of a sense of entitlement or whatever, but just because I'm most familiar with the issues faced by WCN comics vis a vis Alexa -- I'm sure other sites have other issues, each probably unique to its own circumstances):

WCN comics all look like WCN to Alexa -- they're not split out separately. I have the data, but am not sure if I'm allowed to share it (it's something the artists would have to give me permission to do).

Like Sluggy, all WCN comics have their forums housed elsewhere, some at TAC, some at even smaller sites. This puts WCN comics at a disadvantage compared to other sites where the forums are at the same URL. Likewise, the creator's blogs, when they exist, are housed elsewhere. Again, a site with an active blog plus a comic plus a forum will have an advantage in Alexa, which doesn't necessarily reflect the true size of the audience for the comic itself.

Many of our comics are actually more popular in the form of syndicated feeds (embed-ready tooncasts or pure RSS) than they are on WCN itself. For example, American Elf is syndicated on the comics page of a Malaysian newspaper with millions of readers (or, at least, with an Alexa ranking in the three-digit range) -- how many of those readers click through to the comics page and then to American Elf is an open question, only known to the webmaster of that Malaysian website. Now factor in the dozens of other places American Elf is syndicated. Now factor in all the comics on WCN with syndication feeds. RSS itself can be consumed outside of the context of the web -- for example, some number of people suck down the various RSS feeds on WCN for consumption within desktop applications like Outlook or Sharpreader, or on handheld devices like the PSP (where they don't even have to be connected to the Internet to read the comic, in cases where the comic includes an enclosure). I have data for the RSS feed itself, but there's currently no way for me to know how many individual users are reflected in a request for the RSS feed implies (bloglines pings the feed once every thirty minutes, but then mirrors the contents of the feed to all its subscribers based on what it picked up in that one ping, while desktop aggregators might ping fifty times before the individual looks at the feed even once -- and so on, and so on). RSS and tooncasting aren't extremely widespread in webcomics right now, but they will be more and more as time goes on -- and our RSS audience seems to be exceptionally loyal and enthusiastic, based on anecdotal evidence -- essentially, that's where we're building our new generation of hardcore fans, all of whom are hidden to Alexa. I personally don't show up in the server logs of Name Removed -- a great not-very-popular webcomic that surely deserves my "Alexa vote" -- because I read the official full-content feed in SharpReader.

That's not to even bring up the issue of unauthorized feeds for popular comics out there.

And there was more, but I've forgotten most of what I posted earlier. Sorry.

Joey
www.webcomicsnation.com