As a general indicator of "traction", I don't mind the use of traffic estimates per se.
But for comparing AU sites, these numbers are near enough to useless, because they measure "global" traffic (in practice mainly USA traffic), and make no allowance for AU-specific traffic patterns.
Our site (yet to be properly launched) has an Alexa rank higher than Docoloco and a Compete rank higher than OzBargain. I know for a fact our actual traffic is much lower than these sites, and it's the relatively small volume of USA traffic we've been getting that has skewed the stats.
Rather than promote the scene, lists like this make it starkly apparent just how little startup activity there is in AU.
On seeing a headline like this my first reaction is always "there are 100 startups in Australia??", followed upon reading the list by "apparently not".
The rankings of some of those sites are a real worry. A site with an Alexa rank > 1000000 doesn't deserve to be on a top list of anything.
We'd like to have all the airlines like Emirates, and we will once we're better resourced and properly launched.
As for WebJet, we're really trying to do something very different to them, so if they do all you need right now, you're best to stick with them. Our angle is the casual/flexible market, travelers who are price sensitive but date/destination flexible. Kinda the opposite of business travelers.
It matters if your business is the type that can't prosper on determination alone. That kept us going for 6 years. Eventually we needed money and a supportive environment.
I should add that what we gained from YC more than anything else was confidence.
With what we know now, we realise we possibly could have come to Silicon Valley and successfully launched our startup without YC-backing, although it still would have taken much longer.
But we didn't know anyone who could introduce us into the culture, and we had no way of knowing how much potential we had and how reasonable it was to believe we could succeed. We weren't even convinced that our idea was a good one until YC backed it.
So I guess, if you're already confident, you don't need YC.
To some degree I'd agree with you more now having done YC than before.
If you live in the USA and have ways of working yourself into Silicon Valley or some other startup culture, or have some other kind of access to seed funding and mentorship, then you don't need YC to succeed.
For us here in Melbourne, it was much harder. There's a few successful tech entrepreneurs from the 80s and 90s but they don't really get the web. And the angel and VC communities are tiny and unsophisticated.
Sure we could have backed ourselves, left our Melbourne lives behind and headed for Silicon Valley in the hope of finding a way to make things work. And had there not been any other option, perhaps we might have tried that, although at our age, probably not.
YC allowed us to fast-track the whole process. In the space of 5 months we went from just another unknown little startup from Melbourne to demoing our product to some of the world's most astute tech investors and being acclaimed by fellow startup founders and high-profile Valley identities alike.
That's not to say we've succeeded... we have a huge task ahead of us. But YC has helped us do in a few short months what might have taken us years any other way.
We actually stayed for 11 days - we weren't going to fly all that way with the possibility of being unsuccessful, only to return immediately without having any fun.
But we did it on the cheap, and you're in the ballpark with the cost. YC reimbursed us USD $700 like everyone else.