Somehow I stumbled across StatBrain recently which at one time in history maybe, possibly had some point, but currently it seems completely useless. So what is StatBrain? Here’s what the site says:

“Statbrain uses different resources on the web combined with mathematical and statistical methods to estimate how many visits a website has.”

OK, StatBrain…let’s see how you do.

The way StatBrain works is you enter a website into their box and it returns an estimate of how many visitors per day the website gets based on “offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any counter information. The number of visits that Statbrain estimates gives you an idea of the number of visits that a website has, but not the exact visitor number.”

OK, let’s see how it does with WorkAtHomeTruth which gets anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 unique visitors per day:

Estimated number of visits for www.workathometruth.com
Less than 10 visits per day

FAIL!

(Ironically I got an ad for BradsMoney in my results. LOL).

How about a big site like myspace?

Estimated number of visits for www.myspace.com
23,653,442 visits per day

OK. That would be 709,603,260 visits per month.

Now, StatBrain does remind us that “The number that Statbrain estimates is visits. It is also known as visitor sessions and indicates the number of visits that a website has. The number is not the same as unique visitors which usually is a bit lower.”

So, let’s see what a “bit lower” would be. Quantcast and Compete tend to be the more accurate sites for measuring unique visitors. So how does myspace.com fair with those website measurement services?

Quantcast shows myspace at 68.4 Million U.S. people per month. I’d say that’s “a bit” lower than 709,603,260 visis per month – unless the majority of their visitors are coming from other countries, planets, and galaxies (I don’t see how else StatBrain could even come close to 709,603,260.

The graph for myspace.com from Compete.com is shown below:

So we have one word for StatBrain’s myspace results:

FAIL!

How about if I just make up some website that doesn’t even exist and put it into StatBrain?

Let’s try globmonkeybeergrabberflapjack.com:

Estimated number of visits for www.globmonkeybeergrabberflapjack.com
Less than 10 visits per day

Success!