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Alexa, Amazon's Most Flawed Idea
Rub3X writes "The Alexa ranking system is naturally flawed. The data should never be treated as accurate, as it's easily manipulated, and not supported for most browsers in the world. It's an estimate, and nothing more.
" I've been saying that forever, but unfortunately for me, since it's a number on a website that is considered "Real" to some, I'm supposed to take it seriously. I imagine this is a problem for many webmasters out there.
I've pointed this out before. There are weird statistical anomolies that should show that Alexa's webratings are not perfect. Take a look at this data for Slashdot and Digg. The traffic ratings both shoot up withing a s short amount of time. It just doesn't make much sense. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=www.digg.com&y =r&url=www.slashdot.org#top
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I remember for a while LewRockwell.com, which promoted alexa for its readers, was top-500, beating out worldnetdaily.com and gamefaqs.com. Now, nothing against LewRockwell.com, and it is indeed surprisingly popular, but there's no way in hell it's a top 500 site.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I don't see anywhere where you can actually download a toolbar for Firefox - not that I would if they had one.
That's the other problem with Alexa. It doesn't include clueful users. Of course, they aren't statistically significant.
Wikipedia constantly uses Alexa to see if linking to a website or profileing a website is "notable". Despite outrage by the people who submitted the content, usually everything that gets nominated for deletion has some editor cite alexa as a reason to delete it.
One of the things that most Internet marketers miss (myself included at times) is that as you move up the food chain, there are more buyers. If I am pushing a brand-less product, I focus on my CPC rate, conversion rate, etc., and don't care where the ad runs, only the conversion rate there and what I am paying per click.
However, the big boys (Ford Motor Company, Warner Bros. Television, etc.) focus on brand building and budgets. They don't ask if they are making money off the impressions, they have a quarterly budget, spend the budget, and ideally aim for the biggest bang-for-the-buck. However, they don't want their brand associated with marginal content, so they have to approve the site carrying their ad.
Now, they pay dearly for the privilege, but for a content site, a big-name ad agency placing a big brand may be willing to pay substantially more on a CPM basis because they need to cut a deal, take up time, etc. If I am making $5 CPM, I'm not going to spend hours with their legal department, etc., to make $5.05 CPM. Now for $6 or $7 CPM, or even $10, I'll spend time handling them as a client, not running an ad network.
The flip side to this, the ad agency doesn't want to spend hours time from highly paid professionals for a site with 1000-2000 visits/day. They need a bang for the buck, and if their time is going to add $5-$10 on a CPM basis for compliance, then the advertising becomes less viable.
So, when you hit thresholds on major rankings, whether it be Alexa, Nielson, etc., then some of the ad players notice you. So the rankings matter, because maybe hitting top-2000 means you can sign on a few premier accounts. While the traffic jump from spot 2001 to 2000 may not be huge, you may see a HUGE revenue jump if you can sell the inventory.
That's why the things matter, as you move up, companies that won't deal with smaller players because transaction costs are too high show up... More demand for your ad inventory, holding supply constant, means higher prices. Even as you move higher, the supply increases (which would force you to take lower prices to move it), more buyers come on the scene, which usually means a still higher CPM.
The rules change as you move up the food chain, which is why the people that define the food chain matter.
Alex
When Alexa first came out, I was willing to use it. There were two features that it provided, and page ranking was actually the least important. Far more important to me was the goal of building an inverted index of the web -- tracking who linked to this site I was looking at, rather than seeing who this site links to.
:-).
All that changed when Alexa was bought by Amazon. And then the truth came out -- all the information that I thought was private was in the database, and now owned by a commercial company, with no restriction on how they used that information. All the information about me that came to the right of the question mark was now in a commercial database, just as bad as AOL's release of search engine queries.
That gave a 100% loss of trust for me. And not just me.
People who know what's going on won't install Alexa because it's giving unrestricted access to personal information to a commercial company for their own profit. And, the "backwards index" -- which helps the internet navigation globally -- is no longer the focus of the product.
So for most people, it has lost any purpose and functionality.
This is why it is so fundamentally off on any numbers it generates. Heck, Neilson ratings have to be more accurate
Sorry but Alexa is still useful to guage trends and "generalized" site popularity.
Here's a great example: POXNORA STATS
PoxNora is a game that was slashdotted last week. See the big spike in their traffic graph (roughly Oct 13/14)?? That's when they got slashdotted. Don't tell me Alexa stats are completely useless.
What is the reason for web stats? If you're paying per view or per click then the information is directly available.
This leads to an interesting possibility. The ad providers could provide a ranking of sites based on the number of adds that they show there and the number of clicks that are created. This is, of course, open to manipulation via click fraud and other techniques but it would probably be more accurate than Alexa's rankings.
Then, if you wanted to improve this even more you could combine this with the number of searches that go to a page. A large net firm that provided these services could do such a ranking. Google or Yahoo could do this. Perhaps they do, for their internal consumption.