Hitwise publishes stats comparing Gizmodo and Engadget — two of the most popular “gadget blogs”. The stats are interesting… with Engadget supposedly receiving 6x larger a share of visits than Gizmodo. By “visit”, I presume they mean unique visitor rather than page view based on how they describe the term later on.
On the surface, this surprised me, as I always felt Gizmodo and Engadget were of comparable size… but as with all 3rd party traffic data, you have to be suspicious about their methods of collection and how this might skew the result. Hitwise apparently draws from a pool of national Internet Service Providers (ISP) and generates traffic data based on this. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable method, but I still can’t wrap my head around the belief that Engadget draws 6x the visitors as Gizmodo.
Compete’s records show that they have roughly the same amount of traffic, but their methodology is also subject to error.
Fortunately, we do have direct traffic stats for Gizmodo that is directly measured which shows that Gizmodo draws 5,097,121 unique visitors from the U.S. in one month. If we assume this 6x the visitors stat holds true over a month, that means Engadget should be getting 30,000,000 uniques over a month.
To put that in perspective, that would make Engadget twice as large as Digg (whose stats we also have direct measurements) who “only” attracts ~15 million unique U.S. visitors a month. I don’t think that adds up, and while I have no solid proof, I don’t see how the 6x multiple could be accurate.
Normalkid 
Hi Arn
Gizmodo is using sitemeeer, they have link on the site
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s15gizmodo&r=25
The link attached is to traffic predictor, which shows 50+mil visitors, I assume it is global number and not just uniques. Still this number will not go to 5mil unique visitors.
Agree 6x is not accurate.
A few months ago I personally spoke with a ComScore rep who attempted to break it down for me. Even though he worked for ComScore he had nothing but solid things to say about Quantcast. Once a site/publisher signs up with QC, the direct measuring is based on pure data x traffic. Not only do they ignore repeat visits, but the rep even said that some of the other traffic measuring companies can illogically count visits via FTP, which would of course mean image uploading, saving, publishing. Actually, every read/write action done on the sever would be counted as a “visit.”
For the sake of clarity, Hitwise’s data is simply inaccurate. There’s no doubt that Engadget’s site gets a little bit more traffic. But, that’s for reasons besides reach.
The site recently underwent a redesign, it’s snappy, it scales nicely and the infrastructure has clearly been smoothed out.
While Gizmodo is my “read-of-choice” between the two, in order to be fair, Gawker could use a back-end overhaul, with some UI refinement for sure. They are quickly becoming an extremely premium “online magazine” of sorts and they deserve the facelift.
Denton and Gawker would benefit from this substantially.