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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.
Services like Megaupload.com force Non-American/Non-european users to install Alexa toolbar to download the file.
That explains why Alexa has file-upload sites such as Megaupload,rapidshare in the top 10 sites of most countries...
Wincopy
According to the article:
:P
"Alexa has no support for FireFox, Opera or Safari at all. "
According to Alexa's Wiki:
"Users running any browser except Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are not represented. Thus users of Opera, Safari, mobile phone (WAP) browsers are all ignored. Nevertheless, this is still the vast majority of the browser market."
So its half right
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.
Everyone who owns or develops web sites knows this. Anyone who hints in a forum the numbers may be accurate immediately gets slapped down. It's the non-technical advertisers who don't know this. And they're the only ones who care about this ranking in order to gauge how much to spend on purchasing web site advertising. Since almost no web sites publicly display traffic info advertisers find Alexa rankings very convenient and probably just don't understand why they'd be useless.
Until advertisers "get it" or a much more accurate public metric is made available, Alexa rankings will unfortunately matter to web sites that are supported by advertising.
Developers: We can use your help.
The problem is that statisically it's nice to say that 30% does not make a majority but Im sure that spreads changes from website to website. Imagine looking at the statistics for a Linux website. The majority there better not be IE.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Now it's clear that the rankings from this system are heavily skewed and misses a substantial portion of the user base.
This suggests it is useless as a way to estimate how much to pay for advertising on a web site (though since this is usually per click/per display I don't see why ranking matters here). However, it doesn't show that this data can't be usefull for other things. For instance it could be quite usefull to know what other sites the users (or IE users) of a site visit.
In other words the data seems useless for any statistical analysis but it could be quite helpful to know what sorts of users visit a site. Sure slashdot's traffic might be underrepresented but I bet you the data still show that slashdot users are quite likely to go browse gadget purchase sites or programming related sites. If you want to know where to advertise your new fancy gadget or a fancy new programming enviornment that would be very usefull information even if it wouldn't support a rigorous statistical analysis.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
One fact TFA and the Slashdot title both got wrong, is Alexa wasn't Amazon's idea. Until Amazon bought it in 1999, Alexa was the commercial offshoot of archive.org for three years. Alexa is still what gives the Wayback Machine its web crawls.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It doesn't matter, though, since the distribution of toolbars is not uniform across all Internet users. A good example is the website I work on. We know our traffic, yet Alexa under-reports us. We also know a local competitor's traffic -- both sets of numbers are generally public information that advertisers use. They have a nice site but get about 1/2 of our traffic, yet Alexa over-reports them over us by a factor of 3-4.
You can pull accurate statistics if and only if your data points are distributed correctly. Because Alexa has no way to randomly and accurately assign toolbars to users, their data is not reliable in any form.
A similar example is how political polls are taken. You can get accurate numbers with 1,000 adults if, and only if, those 1,000 are random throughout the entire population. You can skew the poll numbers by polling 1,000 Democrats or Republicans only instead of 1,000 random. Your results are only accurate to your surveyed population -- in Alexa's case, their numbers are only accurate so far as "Rank ### amongst Internet Explorer 6.0 users who speak a limited number of languages who have voluntarily installed our toolbar to submit their surfing habits to us for analysis and are subjected to trade secret methods of ranking".
The only way that you could pull accurate numbers would be through all ISPs selecting random data points to find what hostnames people were using. It would have to be filtered, though, to produce accurate numbers in terms of actual "website hits" instead of just "website requests". Keep-alive would further impede accurate results. As would proxies, DNS caches, and HOSTS files.
it's a number on a website that is considered "Real" to some
That's not real, that's int.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Alexa is flawed from the start.
What impetus or benefit would a user have to install a toolbar that tracks them? Other than out of charity to help out this company? I don't get it. Nor do I particularly trust them. Just one more thing to help crash IE.
Seriously, why bother writing two or three sentences anymore? Just put a single link on a single word, that's even less helpful and even less work for the editors.
WTF IS ALEXA?
Another case of "I don't want to waste 30 seconds to explain WTF the news is about, let 50K users waste a few minutes and slashdot a website trying to figure out what it is".
Whenever you conduct a poll, and that's what Alexa is doing, you are always excluding data from those who do not respond to polls (for whatever reason). It's an inherent flaw in polling.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
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
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.