There are a lot of factors that come into play when trying to determine what group of websites get the most traffic. Many people have used the “Reach” statistic from Alexa.com to determine how much traffic that a website receives.

The inherent problem with Alexa is that it estimates the traffic based on the number of people who use the Alexa Toolbar (which is flagged as spyware by most antivirus programs). These estimations give a general idea of how much traffic a site gets, but because of the flawed methodology, Alexa can easily be gamed to show more traffic than a site actually gets. For more information about the inherently problems with Alexa rankings read this creative blog entry titled “20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank“.

Quantcast: A Quantitative Alternative

Quantcast is an alternative which uses far more efficient technology to get direct information about the site traffic as well as the user base of the site. This traffic is not estimated, but gathered directly from your site. This technology makes Quantcast a far better technology to use for comparing site traffic. For a detailed look at how Quantcast works read this article from their website.

Quantcast.com Top 5 Hedge Fund Websites

Based on data from Quantcast, I’ve created the list of the top 5 hedge fund database websites – the lower the number the more traffic.

1. HedgeFund.net (65,751)
2. HedgeCo.net (74,883)
3. BarclayHedge.com (269,328)
4. CogentHedge.com ( 1,232,726)
5. HedgeWorld.com (1,543,837)

There are many types of traffic which quantcast will not catch, but it is by far the most accurate of all third-party online website traffic tracking services.

Compete.com tells a different story & puts HedgeCo.Net as #1

Showing that not all third party web site traffic trackers are created equal, I ran the top 3 contesters HedgeFund.net, HedgeCo.net and BarclayHedge through compete.com yet another third party traffic tracker.

As you can clearly see from this graph, Compete.com is estimating that HedgeCo.net has over 3 times as many Unique visitors as HedgeFund.net and BarclayHedge.com