orkutmyspacealexaTechCrunch today looks at the claim that Google’s Orkut social networking site is not only steadily rising in page views, but beat out MySpace.

The Alexa graph is on the left, but when TechCrunch runs the Comscore numbers, it turns out that Orkut (198 million) lags far behind MySpace (35 billion), and in fact that MySpace has more page views than all the other social networking sites combined.

TechCrunch claims that ‘Clearly something is out of whack at Alexa with regard to Orkut specifically.’ In September, 2006, according to Alexa, MySpace had around 18,000 pageviews daily. According to Comscore, it was 56 million ‘monthly uniques’ and 35 billion monthly pageviews.

What’s going on with Alexa?

Alexa only tracks traffic from Web users who’ve installed the Alexa toolbar. It then proposes statistics by extrapolating to the Internet user base as a whole. For example, today’s ‘reach’ for orkut.com is 33,000 per million users. I’m guessing that’s extrapolated, because I don’t think the Alexa toolbar has one million downloads.

Since Alexa does not state what the total Internet user base is, we can only guess…From bCentral, “Current global estimates (2004-5) indicate that there are upwards of 700 million of us online, 840 million according to the GlobalReach research agency.” Today’s page views per user according to Alexa are 38.9. Now, 38.9 x 700 million = 27.23 billion - far closer to Comscore’s figures.

Note: One of the commenters on TechCrunch also states that Comscore only takes into account U.S. figures.