I was poking around Craigslist today when I came across this Alexa chart of daily pageviews comparing Craigslist to Monster and Careerbuilder. Shockingly, Craigslist (the blue line) has included a chart on its own site which would lead one to believe that it crushes the other 2 mega job boards in terms of daily pageviews.

But what got my attention, in addition to the fact that it’s an Alexa chart which makes the data highly suspect if not outright meaningless, was the date of the chart – August 15th, 2007. For supposedly the most modern, hip, successful, and technologically sophisticated in a neanderthal sort of way of web companies, this seemed woefully outdated (and as backwards as its site design). So I pulled a new chart (monthly pageviews for 12 months ending November, 2008) from Compete.com, a far better source of site analytics.

According to Compete, Craigslist and Hotjobs barely register on the chart of monthly pageviews when compared to Monster and Careerbuilder. I’m no big defender of the mega job boards, and the trends for each of the 4 sites listed above should raise some eyebrows, but I despise even more ridiculous claims of superiority.