The admins of social media site Reddit have been active in the last couple of days. After pleading for financial help from the site's users, which turned out to be a success and brought forth a new, freemium business model for Reddit, they're now pointing out that Reddit has a lot more traffic than most analysts give them credit for.

If you look at services that measure traffic, such as Compete. Quantcast or Nielsen, Reddit has, on average, less than 1 million monthly unique visits.

The truth, Reddit's admins claim, is very different, and they've supported it with a screenshot (below) from the site's Google Analytics report from June 14 to July 14, 2010.







According to Reddit's own Google Analytics data - which is arguably far more accurate than any third-party measurements - Reddit has over 8 million monthly unique visitors, 36 million visits and over 400 million monthly page views.

Why the discrepancy? Is it a technical issue? Reddit admins themselves don't know. In a blog post, they're asking for help: "Can you grep the server logs to see how many visitors we send your way, and how it compares to other major referers? That kind of information would be invaluable."

From our experience, web traffic analysis services are much better for determining trends than comparing absolute numbers. Many of them, such as Compete, are U.S.-biased; some may be biased with regards to what operating system or browser the visitors are using. Sometimes, their numbers fluctuate wildly: recently, several sites wrote about Digg losing a third of its traffic in just one month, according to Compete. Looking at the same graph now, Digg's traffic numbers look vastly different.

Perhaps Reddit's public outing will make analysts take a second look at their estimates of the site's traffic. Still, more importantly, Reddit claims its traffic is constantly growing, and its vibrant community seems to be as active as ever. When times got tough, the service managed to leverage users' loyalty and create a new business opportunity. Hopefully, Reddit will continue to innovate and prove that this type of social media site, where users themselves create and curate most of the content, has a future.