A common conspiracy theory in the internet is, that the famous traffic counter at Alexa Internet is fake. The story is told because a single instance is determine which website is in the top500 list and which not. But the data itself are hidden and the assumption is that Alexa manipulates the traffic into higher regions because if a large scale website like Facebook is not the charts of the most visited websites in the internet it will look bad.
To determine if the conspiracy of manipulated traffic measurement is fake or reality we need an alternative source to check the data. Getting detailed information about the internet traffic to a certain website is not possible. Because the access.log files of companies like Facebook and What's app are the secret of each company. But there is an alternative source available which is provided for free to the internet. This source is called the worldcat book library and it contains all the printed books. I have determined the number of total books about mainstream social networks:
Facebook 34000 hits
Twitter 29000 hits
Instagram 3900
Wordpress 2300
Linkedln 1700
Reddit 1000
myspace 1300
tumblr 450
"social networks", 52000
"social media", 84000
Before an author can write a book about a social network he will use it in reality. Also the probability is high, that the readers of a book will try it out to. What we can say for sure is, that number of printed books about social networks is high, and that most tutorials were printed about the Facebook social network. This fits well to the Alexa Internet statistics. It can't answer the question what the concrete traffic in transmitted Megabytes per day is, but the worldcat catalog has some information about Facebook so the website is true website with real users.
To get more precise data about the published books, the amount of books in the Amazon kindle store have to be included. Many books about Facebook are not published in the normal publishing industry but put to the market over self-publishing. Unfurtunately the kindle store doesn't has a searchable list but the Amazon website says, that more than 10000 ebooks are in the database which are containing the term “Facebook”. So it seems that the ebook statistics fits well to the printed books statistics.
In most reports about social media, Facebook is displayed in the pie chart are the traffic machine for around 80% of all the visits, while the other social networks combined have only 20%. In the printed book statistics, books about Facebook are the majority of all books, so it seems that the statistics is legitimate again. If somebody would like to manipulate social media at all, he has to fake the Alexa Traffic counter and the number of books in the worldcat catalogue. This is possible by adding fake printed books and generating fake book sales in the bookstore by staged customers. If the customer in bookstore gets angry, because the new book about Facebook is not there, then he is really upsets and it is not a game.