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I am estimating the market size for a web business in a specific niche. To do this the first step is to estimate the current and historic traffic for each of the existing websites in the niche.

I have looked at alexa.com, compete.com and trafficestimates.com.

None provide what I'm looking for: - alexa.com only has current/ 3 months data - Compete.com has 2 years historic (if you pay for it) - however the estimates vary a lot month to month and I have heard the estimates are way off (certainly for my own websites they are far off) - trafficestimates.com seems even worse in terms of data quality

How would you size the traffic for a website, both current, and historic? I'd like to go back 10 years if possible... ambitious I know.

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You will ever face the problem with data quality. Try http://www.google.com/trends where you could compare sites or keywords and see the traffic development depending on your keywords or sites for many years history.

However, you need to take into account, that even the numbers in google might include traffic which was generated just to find keyword rankings. But I guess you will have that problem with any other source as well.

BTW: I don't understand why you want to have a 10 years traffic history. INHO it makes no sense, if the trend for the last few years (2-3 yr) is up, than it is probably growing in future. If you like to find out the Market Size, I don't think that Traffic is the number you need, instead it would be better to focus on Sales Volume in that market and if that is growing, as well as if people spend more today than in the past.

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+1 10 years in one of the most disruptive enironments means that your comparing apples to oranges at some point. – John Bogrand Aug 24 '10 at 20:56

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