Slashdot Mirror

interesting about friendster... your post inspired me to have a look at friendster's alexa rankings

not too shabby... looks like they did *something* about the beginning of the year, because traffic really took off then

Dammit, never for get to close a tag! Lets try again

Well, if you look at Alexa THey are fairly similar, however Alexa is notoriously inexact. For one thing, it doesn't work if you use firefox, which constitutes around 60% of both sites. Google Trends paints a more believable story perhaps with slashdot remaining fairly steady and digg slowly climbing and finally overtakes slashdot. Note though that slashdot doesn't really lose any traffic to digg. I'd say that's fairly accurate even though it's only measuring web-searches.

Well, if you look at Alexa THey are fairly similar, however Alexa is notoriously inexact. For one thing, it doesn't work if you use firefox, which constitutes around 60% of both sites. Google Trends paints a more believable story perhaps with slashdotremaining fairly steady and digg slowly climbing and finally overtakes slashdot. Not though that slashdot doesn't really lose any traffic to it. I'd say that's fairly accurate even though it's only measuring web-searches.

most chinese web sites are designed to be million-request scale. even for some online forums and BBSs that are not so famous, it is not uncommon to always have thousands of users constantly online/logged in.

i don't think any well-known chinese sites can be easily slashdotted.

here is another example of the pageview for the site www.sina.com.cn. alexa for www.sina.com.cn

most chinese web sites are designed to be million-request scale. even for some online forums and BBSs that are not so famous, it is not uncommon to always have thousands of users constantly online/logged in.

i don't think any well-known chinese sites can be easily slashdotted.

here is another example of the pageview for the site www.sina.com.cn. alexa for www.sina.com.cn

..a page that (in general) gets almost no traffic --- and got a lot less traffic right before they made their fuss the first time --- gets a huge traffic boost every time a stupid artcle like this comes out. Just look at the Alexa traffic listing for fun. Notice the traffic drop in Q4 2005 and then the sharp rise in Q2 2006.

• 230 sites with a Server: Apache/* header
  115 sites with some other product in their Server: header
  86 sites with a Server: Microsoft-IIS/* header
  68 sites with an empty Server: header
  

• 43 GWS
  17 Netscape-Enterprise
  9 Sun-ONE-Web-Server
  5 Zeus
  5 lighttpd
  

Note that itunes.com is just a redirect to apple.com/itunes.

And Apple is ranked 52. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=allofmp3&url=http://apple.com/

And what's more, the iTunes store is not a website, but rather an xml-based service delivered within the iTunes player app. Visits to the iTunes store do not involve a browser, and are not recorded by Alexa. Apple's rank consists entirely of people who wish to download the player app, or look at iPods or Macs or something. And it does not include Mac users at all, because the Alexa toolbar is Windows only.

not sprprisingly, the massive attention has driven AOMP3 traffic through the roof Traffic Rank: 982 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=allofmp3&url=http://allofmp3.com/ compared to itunes: 82,328 [lower is better] http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=allofmp3&url=http://itunes.com/ nothing sells like controversy

not sprprisingly, the massive attention has driven AOMP3 traffic through the roof Traffic Rank: 982 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=allofmp3&url=http://allofmp3.com/ compared to itunes: 82,328 [lower is better] http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=allofmp3&url=http://itunes.com/ nothing sells like controversy

Hear the sheeps? Can you hear it? The unmistakable sound of people pulling shit out of their ASSES. Marketing speak from the clueless boards of disinformation.
Speaking as someone who runs a bunch of sites for a, my firm netting midrange xx,xxx usd this year based on about 2½ years work. This income is from my traffic. Not my super ideas, not my uber talent at coding, especially not my elite design skills. Especially not from me doing web2.0. However, the only requirement from my income is that I work like a hour a day keeping things flowing + make sure servers are up (not like now, when the main hdd in one of my servers is down.. :(( ).
Digg is ranked #153 in the world according to alexa. That means there are 152 sites bigger than it, and about 3294823094820934 sites smaller. Digg is HUGE in terms of traffic. Traffic equals ad dollars. It is that simple. You can run a highly specialised site on medical advice and get high paying vistors, or you can run a generic flash-game-arcade site that gives a couple of cents per 1000 impression. Regardless of what type of site you run, a visitor equals income.

Digg doesnt do anything particular at this moment for different users, neither do I. Sure, you can probably increase your CPM if you can direct ads, but it is what makes the site it's worth? No its not. Without traffic any site is NOTHING. It's not about smart ad systems, its not about web2.0.

It's traffic.

Why do Google and Yahoo provide this information anyhow? Because if they don't, they fear getting blocked from China allowing its public to access their sites. If they both provide this information, then neither side loses traffic. Which both are pretty much neck and neck Google vs. Yahoo except for the glitch in that one spot, they are in fact closer than ever. If one does not give in to China's request and ther other does, bye bye traffic from China.

Gets its ass kicked? I don't see many people moving from Java to Ruby. From Perl, Python, and PHP, people are switching to Ruby in hordes. But from Java? A trickle, if anything.

You are missing my point. I am saying the enterprise approach to things only applies to a selection of software projects. Sun has ignored the ease-of-use and low-barrier-to-entry criteria for years and years. This means that small projects correctly don't use Java because it's not economical. They uses PHP, Rails, and the like.

But large projects often start as small projects, so Sun is, presumably accidentally, driving a lot of users away from Java. There is no good reason for this; the world wanted Rails, and Sun missed the boat. When I look at the Alexa Global 100, none of the up-and-comers I recognize seem to be using Java. I know that Craigslist, MySpace, and Flickr are built on those non-enterprise technologies you disdain; in a few years I'd bet will see some Ruby on Rails entries, but none for, say, Java Server Faces or Struts.

Enterprise developers are, by nature, unlikely to use Rails yet because they are relatively conservative. Java is, in many ways, the new COBOL. But Rails, which used Ruby's greater power to dramatically increase ease of use, now has created a substantial user base for Ruby.

And unlike Perl and PHP, Ruby has the potential to be an enterprise-scale language. It's a much better OO language than Java in many ways. With a few improvements, some supporting tools, and another five years, you will see Ruby invading enterprise shops if Sun doesn't counter effectively.

And a quick look at Alexa's traffic ranking graph for Slashdot.org shows that you are wrong. While there was indeed a dip in viewing, during 2005 compared to 2004, viewing returned to 2004 levels in the beginning of 2006 and lately spiked quite high.

"The whole concept of somebody paying a website owner on the basis that visitors to the website might have seen an advert {but probably are not going to do anything about it, and almost certainly not buy the product} is just broken on too many levels to be sustainable."

Interesting. Ad-supported sites have been around for more than a decade. Of the top five sites in the US, four of them (Yahoo, Google, MSN and MySpace) are ad-supported. Most of the others near the top are stores (ebay, Amazon and the like) or support a brick-and-mortar business. The highest-ranked site I could find that make their money through selling services are craigslist (although one could call that an ad-supported site) and match.com (which, I guess, is also an ad-supported site, in a way).

When you say it's unsustainable, do you mean that you think it might collapse in the next three to six months? Or are you talking years down the road?

It is also worth noting that Digg has rapidly gained popularity to the point that Slashdot and Digg are now neck and neck according to Alexa.

Digg is an interesting site that implements a number of things many long-time Slashdot users have wished Slashdot would do for quite some time. It would be a shame if they are failing to live up to their claim of non-hierarchial editorial control. If this is true, then they deserve to be outed.

According to Alexa, around 100 million people. However, a traffic rank of 353 does not equate to 9th rank on a survey! FYI, Myspace is ranked 8, for traffic alone.

Unbelievably, according to Alexa, Slashdot is only the 301st on the Global top 500. It's not in the top 100 Us sites, nor in the top 100 English sites.

Unbelievably, according to Alexa, Slashdot is only the 301st on the Global top 500. It's not in the top 100 Us sites, nor in the top 100 English sites.

Unbelievably, according to Alexa, Slashdot is only the 301st on the Global top 500. It's not in the top 100 Us sites, nor in the top 100 English sites.

According to Alexa, MySpace has been in the top 10 for a while now.. http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500

What do you think of tools like [Alexa]? Are the numbers even representative of slashdot traffic?

Ok, something I don't like about all this "digg vs slashdot" war thingy is that whilst digg readership has been increasing to match slashdots (both have increased actually), there has been no reduction in slashdot readers.
People have been using OTHER time to read digg and not abandoning slash.
There is no reason whatsoever for digg to replace slash, they do different jobs and if anything, digg has the fark crowd more than the slash folks.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &compare_sites=digg.com&y=r&q=&url=slashdot.org

Just a couple of months ago i visited this page http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500. The ranking now has altered more than expected. Google should have been on the top of the top list, but also think about the research done by comScore Media. Let us take a look at some of the networking sites like http://www.blogger.com/ and http://www.hi5.com/. These site is much popular in the Asian countries like India and China. Huh ... the population matters ... that too to take part freely. I bet it will increase more ... let it ...

You don't need a research paper to tell you where the traffic is going.

Check out Alexa's Society Category. It's rife with the named blogging machines and even Slashdot!

All the report provides is the sheer visiting numbers and the rate of increase over the past year. And give proof that Tom over at MySpace is laughing all the way to the bank. You may call me a karma whore but that man has 68475709 friends!

I think it oughta handle things just fine.

But the problem with these sites is that there is no long-term way to guarantee their popularity. Look at Friendster- it had an exponential growth rate until MySpace hit the scene. Since then it has been slowly losing visitors. Any remember amIhotornot.com? And I read an article somewhere about a backlash at MySpace over some of the new concerns the community had about the site's new corporate ownership. What is to prevent the same thing happening at Facebook if Viacom does something the users don't agree with. Remember - if someone pays $2bn, they're gonna want to squeeze $2b out of the users somehow. I don't expect the new owner to put the users ahead of $$$$.

Tell that to Google. It's not like money can be made from ads.

I believe the last stats I read had MySpace user registration doubling every six months. They are rated number 8 on Alexa, only behind companies like Google, Yahoo, MSN and eBay.

Perhaps the apparent business model of a social networking site isn't immediately obvious. That is, until, you think about what a media conglomerate like News Corp can do with such an active community. News Corp has holdings like Fox News and primetime shows like American Idol. You can bet that they will leverage their MySpace internet real-estate to push users towards their old media offerings. That, in itself, will generate a lot of revenue.

It seems as though their plan worked, check out their Alexa pagerank since the lawsuit gained attention.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=2y&size=large&compare_sites=&y=r&url=kinder start.com

you can see how their traffic started falling here

And I have never seen a copy of Haaretz or Pravda, nor have I been to Russia or Israel, but I know what the fuck that they are when I read them on the Web.

While the Monitor may have a small paper distribution, apparently they reach a great deal of readers online. (With readership in the range of those other small US papers that I mentioned.)

There is no barrier to knowledge, nowadays, beyond personal ambivalence.

It doesn't matter how good the next MSN search is. If they decide to degrade the service in favour of trying to make more money, users will flee to another provider. It's that simple.

No shit - according to alexa 73% of the people who uses msn uses it just for for hotmail, only a 8% uses the search engine and only 3% bothers to go the main page

Yahoo is pretty similar. 53% of their visitors do it just for email, only 8% for search and 2% for the main page

And of course, gmail beats both yahoo and hotmail - both have a ajax-like email interface in development but google has been eroding their market share for too many time.

So it doesn't come as a surprise that google is winning market share, and both msn and yahoo are losing it. MSN in fact lost for first time their #2 position in 2006. I'm not surprise that msn is taking "radical movements" and doing optimistic announcements like this, they don't want to lose the #2.

Google, however, has won a lot of users the last year, and it will win more if yahoo and msn doesn't stop being stupid and bring a bit of USABILITY to their pages. MSN is developing a new search engine? Good luck, google is years ahead of you, the first product the msn search geniuses produced was search.msn.com, and according to some web page, the microsoft directives laughed at them for doing something that offers nothing that google doesn't already do.

How many times has Gates announced that he's building a better google? Just the same number of times that he has said that this next version of windows was going to be great.

It doesn't matter how good the next MSN search is. If they decide to degrade the service in favour of trying to make more money, users will flee to another provider. It's that simple.

No shit - according to alexa 73% of the people who uses msn uses it just for for hotmail, only a 8% uses the search engine and only 3% bothers to go the main page

Yahoo is pretty similar. 53% of their visitors do it just for email, only 8% for search and 2% for the main page

And of course, gmail beats both yahoo and hotmail - both have a ajax-like email interface in development but google has been eroding their market share for too many time.

So it doesn't come as a surprise that google is winning market share, and both msn and yahoo are losing it. MSN in fact lost for first time their #2 position in 2006. I'm not surprise that msn is taking "radical movements" and doing optimistic announcements like this, they don't want to lose the #2.

Google, however, has won a lot of users the last year, and it will win more if yahoo and msn doesn't stop being stupid and bring a bit of USABILITY to their pages. MSN is developing a new search engine? Good luck, google is years ahead of you, the first product the msn search geniuses produced was search.msn.com, and according to some web page, the microsoft directives laughed at them for doing something that offers nothing that google doesn't already do.

How many times has Gates announced that he's building a better google? Just the same number of times that he has said that this next version of windows was going to be great.

It doesn't matter how good the next MSN search is. If they decide to degrade the service in favour of trying to make more money, users will flee to another provider. It's that simple.

No shit - according to alexa 73% of the people who uses msn uses it just for for hotmail, only a 8% uses the search engine and only 3% bothers to go the main page

Yahoo is pretty similar. 53% of their visitors do it just for email, only 8% for search and 2% for the main page

And of course, gmail beats both yahoo and hotmail - both have a ajax-like email interface in development but google has been eroding their market share for too many time.

So it doesn't come as a surprise that google is winning market share, and both msn and yahoo are losing it. MSN in fact lost for first time their #2 position in 2006. I'm not surprise that msn is taking "radical movements" and doing optimistic announcements like this, they don't want to lose the #2.

Google, however, has won a lot of users the last year, and it will win more if yahoo and msn doesn't stop being stupid and bring a bit of USABILITY to their pages. MSN is developing a new search engine? Good luck, google is years ahead of you, the first product the msn search geniuses produced was search.msn.com, and according to some web page, the microsoft directives laughed at them for doing something that offers nothing that google doesn't already do.

How many times has Gates announced that he's building a better google? Just the same number of times that he has said that this next version of windows was going to be great.

It doesn't matter how good the next MSN search is. If they decide to degrade the service in favour of trying to make more money, users will flee to another provider. It's that simple.

No shit - according to alexa 73% of the people who uses msn uses it just for for hotmail, only a 8% uses the search engine and only 3% bothers to go the main page

Yahoo is pretty similar. 53% of their visitors do it just for email, only 8% for search and 2% for the main page

And of course, gmail beats both yahoo and hotmail - both have a ajax-like email interface in development but google has been eroding their market share for too many time.

So it doesn't come as a surprise that google is winning market share, and both msn and yahoo are losing it. MSN in fact lost for first time their #2 position in 2006. I'm not surprise that msn is taking "radical movements" and doing optimistic announcements like this, they don't want to lose the #2.

Google, however, has won a lot of users the last year, and it will win more if yahoo and msn doesn't stop being stupid and bring a bit of USABILITY to their pages. MSN is developing a new search engine? Good luck, google is years ahead of you, the first product the msn search geniuses produced was search.msn.com, and according to some web page, the microsoft directives laughed at them for doing something that offers nothing that google doesn't already do.

How many times has Gates announced that he's building a better google? Just the same number of times that he has said that this next version of windows was going to be great.

Actually Slashdot's traffic trippled just a couple months ago. At least among IE uses with the alexa toolbar installed.

Kind of weird, and annoying given how crappy this place has become. No one with any authority cares about the site at all. It's pretty lame.

he-ah and almost me-ah

he-ah and almost me-ah

MSN #2 in top 500 English sites http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500

The TFA contains no mention of Alexa at all. Does the submitter have information not disclosed or is it pure speculation that the government will use their platform as opposed to their own or some other commercial product?

PC World as an article on this where AFP sued Google for copyright infringement and Google dropped 'em. It appears AFP is just now getting back to the traffic levels they had before the row with Google.

Since its launch, and especially during the latest six months or so, the site has been growing at a great pace - exponential growth is actually an apt term.

During the past six months they've had a few server switches and almost constant rejiggering, and they're just settling in with a new bunch of servers, partly because of hardware failure. My assessment of the whole deal is that poor programming, actual scalability or design hasn't been the problem as much as growing pains (more users AND abusers like moronic spiders clogging bandwidth and stealing capacity), power outages and hardware just flat out not working. Although I don't rely on their service myself or use it more than, say, once quarterly, they're a competent bunch, and I fully trust that it will all work itself out in the end.

You say that Google is essentially the monopoly carrier for information. That is simply not true, especially not in China. There are tons of search engines which produce results that, while perhaps not as brilliant as Google, are certainly good enough for 99% of all searches. In China, this is even more true. Do you know what the 4th most visited site on the internet is? A hint: It's not in english. Just because google is biggest, does not mean it has the monopoly on information.

Now, there is the matter of wheter google should have censored it's results. People are saying that it is in blatant disregard for the "Do No Evil" policy, and it is, as you say, hypocritical. It's not, it really isn't. The googleblog explains this quite well. The only other argument that i've heard is that google should not be laying down to insane Chinese censorship laws, that they should Fight The Evil Chinese Government, and Stand Up For Freedom, Democracy, and Puppies Everywhere. But you know what, that is not for Google to do. Do you think a damn thing would change if Google refused to censor, and would be itself censored in China? No, not a damn thing (as there are Chinese replacements who don't even tell you that stuff is being censored). It shouldn't be the companies who force humanitarian change. It's not the role of Google to make the world better, because they can't! They say that they will collect and organize all the worlds information, and they will do so without resorting to evil practices.

Are you saying that, in addition to that, they should also rid the world of evil?

Get of your ideological high horse, and come live in the real world

If you can believe alexa http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=3m&size=medium&compare_sites=google.com&y=r &url=WWW.YAHOO.COM#top/
They show that google has just recently passed yahoo as the most accessed page on the web, and MSN is a close third. However its not 100% accurate, because IIRC it requires the alexa toolbar to be installed.

For what it's worth, the Alexa ranking for Sex.com is 3,560.
If this is a benchmark, think of the value of any top ranked site like Business.com

For what it's worth, the Alexa ranking for Sex.com is 3,560.
If this is a benchmark, think of the value of any top ranked site like Business.com

Since that fund raising drive is now $50k above the budget shortfall, it's not a shortfall anymore. The present $200k raised in the fund drive is about twice what was raised by the same drive in February last year... The shortfall was for Q4 of 2005. The current drive aims to get rid of that shortfall and put us in a good position for Q1 of 2006. That proposed budget, so far, is well above $500,000 and may need to be cut pending the outcome of this drive. Either way, we will still need to have another fund drive later this quarter to get rid of this quarter's shortfall and put us in a good position at the start of next quarter. Hopefully some large percentage of the huge increase in people using Wikipedia in the last month will have come to love Wikipedia enough by then to donate. BTW, I'm Daniel Mayer.

lol, the BBC actually has a seperate server farm in NY partly beacuse of the number of visitors to its worldwide news site from the USA (also for disaster recovery). I don't think the BBC does too badly, 24m page impressions a day isn't bad. Alexa traffic details for CNN put it at 27m so the 'brits' are doing quite well for a small country! When you talk about the BBC as a government news organisation, it is paid for by the British tax payer but maintains editorial and commisioning independence in all its publications.

Wikipedia is one of the most heavily loaded sites on the internet (currently ranked #24). Apprently (for instance) they push hundreds of megabytes of data per second.

Servers are not cheap, and Wikimedia needs lots of them. They list 129 new servers in 2005. Looking at the hardware stats of these servers, they obviously cost many thousands of dollars each (can someone give me more accurate pricing?).

All of these things are not cheap. Also note that Wikipedia needs more server coordination that many other sites, because the content is dynamic and the database huge. If you're just looking up info, that's fine, the content can be mirrored across many different servers across the world. But when you edit material, there must be a way to propagate those changes quickly. In fact, those of us who edit Wikipedia know that it becomes much slower when you enter edit mode, since all such changes have to go through a central server (as I understand it), rather than just the "closest and faster" server available.

All of this to say that running Wikipedia is by no means cheap. Yes, they really do need that much money ($100,000/year for servers and bandwidth is pretty cheap when you realize how much they manage to accomplish with it). Hopefully the donations will always be enough to keep up with the demand for this content.

(P.S.: Yes, some of the servers they use were donated. These donations are also vital to the ongoing success of Wikimedia.)

Well, this is how it has always been. Almost all of the funds are needed to keep up with the exponentially-increasing traffic to the site. Without those, the site will just get slower and slower (and slower).