Podshow and Alexa

I'm not going to go into huge detail about what Alexa is and how it works, but it's regarded as a reasonable gauge as to which websites are generating the most traffic in the world.

The Keith and the Girl podcast have a bit of a 'tiff' (I don't know what else to say about it) with Dawn and Drew, and on the KaTG forums someone put up info on which of the two have the best Alexa rankings.

Here's a post from said forum; quote

Alexa Stats Keithandthegirl.com 51,570 dawnanddrew.podshow.com 14,751 Very distrubing until i did some more searchs Dawnanddrew.com 4,301,756 podshow.com 14,751 deltasierracharl.podshow.com 14,751 yeastradio.podshow.com 14,751 i think you get the idea. Basicly every time someone goes to a website of a podcast owned by podshow the main podshow.com gets a hit on alexa. So podshow can boast huge numbers and the individual podcasts can also boast the same numbers.

End quote.

Does this make Podshow evil? You decide.

UPDATE:
I've posted this up to various podcast forums and the overwhelming response has been that, not only is Alexa a fairly ignored-by-the-ordinary-person statistic, but that sites such as Blogger, Libsyn etc have the same issue. Alexa looks at the main domain, ignoring the subdomains.

What's happened with Podshow is common and most certainly not evil.

Here are some comments;
From the Britcaster forum-
Why the accusations without the research? Makes KATG look like they can't be bothered to research how the Alexa chart is compiled.

Quote:

"Alexa's traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com)"

Plus:

Quote:

Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews.

The dawnanddrew.podshow.com domain has been there for a lot longer than 3 months, the beta has only been going for around 4 weeks so anyone freshly registering won't be able to accumulate as many hits in the last 3 months.

If registering under any podshow.com subdomain increases your Alexa popularity surly thats a good thing as your stats are bumped up by Podshows popularity.

Is it me or is anyone else fed up with podcasters bitching at each other over hits and popularity? Can't we just all have a laugh instead of throwing out rattles out of the pram with the instinctive reaction to make anyone above you in a chart into an enemy'? I'm honoured to be alongside some big name podcasts in charts, who cares if they get a thousand more listeners or clickthroughs to their site? Put your energy into making a better show rather than complaining that "its not fair" when a third party site that ranks stuff puts you below someone else.
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From Podcast Pickle -
The people that use alexia are advertisers and such. I do not think any listeners would care. If you were a company interested in working with Podshow you ma use their Alexa rating to get an idea of how popular they are.
Posted by P Dilly

Conclusion:
This proves nothing regarding Podshow's alleged evilness, rather a quickness for people to interpret stats incorrectly!