Is Alexa the most reliable tool for web statistics?

Most media planners in India depend on Alexa rankings to determine the website ranking. But the media planners or those who use Alexa use it because there is no other way one can determine the traffic except from the owners of the domain themselves. In most cases the domain owners exaggerate the traffic figures. The other option is to ask for google analytics which is the most authentic figures since Google pays for the ads that is displayed on the domains. Now again the traffic that you see at the first instance is for home page while there are various sub pages which should be calculated cumulatively to get to a conclusion of web traffic.
Now this traffic doesn’t calculate the quality of traffic to your sites. Take for example a person with annual income of 3 lakhs visiting a site and a person worth 10 billion visiting the same site. How do you judge the quality of these two individuals? In other words the person with 10 billion is worth traffic of thousands. It is not possible to determine that. But it is possible to guess who will come to a particular site according to the nature of the site. If it is a media site, it will be media players, if it is a logistics site, it will be logistics industry and same goes with commodity players. Now the best way is to judge is to see how rich is the particular sector.
Want to see how Alexa is limited to those who have their tools installed in the sytem? By the admission of Alexa on their site, ‘Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users and data collected from other, diverse sources over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day.’
Now read again. It says unique Alexa users and not the users of your domain name.
It further says ‘ Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.
It adds that 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) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.’
Now here is the Alexa tool bar which you have to download and install in order to determine which sites you visit : http://www.alexa.com/site/download/
So there is a toolbar community of Alexa users who gives web statistics to Alexa. Simply by using the Firefox and IE toolbars each member contributes valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not. This information is returned to the community as Related Links, Traffic Rankings and more. The Alexa ranking is a relative measure of the number of Alexa toolbar users that visit the site. If your visitors include a high percentage of people using the toolbar, you’ll have a disproportionally low Alexa number. There are even automated bots that can game the Alexa ranking without you even having to visit your own site.
So why is everyone bothering so much about their Alexa ranking? Just because the web has developed but some tools are yet to be developed. For that to take place there are some copyright infringements involved. If IE and Firefox, two of the most used internet tool has to integrate collection of web statistics, you are automatically given to understand that it is intruding your privacy. So that is not taking place for want of legal issues. But that is the only way to truly determine the web statistics, not Alexa.