Slashdot Mirror
The Real Problem With Alexa
As the defacto 'Guy in Charge' of a reasonably large web site, I am routinely asked questions by a variety of people that lead inevitably to Alexa. It might be a question from my Boss at SourceForge about traffic. Or it might be a sales guy asked by a possible advertiser why some other random website is bigger or smaller than Slashdot. Most often it's a random reporter doing background for a story that has nothing to do with Slashdot. Why I'm considered an expert is very confusing, but why they always regard Alexa rankings as meaningful is even more so.
Here's the problem: Alexa doesn't work because of who will install it, and perhaps more importantly, who won't. Let's start with a place I'm very familiar with: Slashdot readers. Until recently Alexa didn't work on Firefox... instead only IE users participated. On the internet as a whole that's fine: like 80% of users run IE. But on Slashdot only like a quarter of you do.
What about re-installing the plug-in after you update your browser? When Firefox 2.0 came out, almost a third of Slashdot readers upgraded within a few days. You upgrade Minor Firefox releases overnight. Even IE users of Slashdot update relatively fast, from 6 to 7 or even minor revisions. New versions often break old plug-ins. When you get that alert that a plug-in is out of date do you just forget about it? I know I do. And that's not even counting clean OS installs. But if I went to random non-technical friends and family installations, I frequently see versions of software so dated it makes me cringe.
And that's not even talking about the fact that Alexa's toolbar is pretty much spyware. How many Slashdot readers are giddy to install spyware? You either? Big surprise. Because of who we are, and what it is, our population will self select out of consideration.
Did you know Alexa excludes SSL? How many etrade users do you think there are? Now personally I'm glad that they aren't tracking my browsing at my credit card company, but it's just another factor reducing accuracy.
Equally perplexing is the accounting of iframes. Let's look at someone like double click's alexa rating. Now it's hard to say, but I don't think I've ever visited their website. Have you? But according to Alexa, they have nearly a 1% share of the internet. I'd tend not to believe it... but they have iframes on zillions of web pages and counting those sure would account for this huge ranking. What about all those badges for the popular social networking websites? What influence are those iframes having on Alexa rankings? Alexa's FAQ says they don't count, but I'm skeptical.
In Fact, Alexa KNOWS that it is a flawed metric for measuring. Have you ever tried actually looking up alexa on alexa? Unsurprisingly, it is unavailable. Why? Visitors to Alexa.com would be the most likely of any user population on-line to have installed their plug-in. I don't know what their 'Rank' would be, but I bet it clearly would be an apples to oranges comparison against ANY other site on-line.
Of course who do you think actually will go out of their way to install something like this? I have a good guess... if you are obsessed with acronyms like SEO or terms like PageRank you are very likely to care very much about these things. I spend a real percentage of my week dealing with people flooding my systems with garbage content designed to screw with these ratings. And you know they all have the toolbar installed so their zillions of worthless spam websites are being counted.
This problem has parallels elsewhere of course: The Nielsen ratings struggle to account for PVRs. Since you got a TiVo, when was the last time you watched "Live" TV? This is part of why Science Fiction shows struggle on TV... scifi fans are early adopters. So we stopped getting counted and our favorite genres are butchered by networks and lost to the void. PVR users tend to be wealthy (those boxes are expensive) and educated. Now I'm not saying that the dumbing down of TV is exclusively the fault of Tivo, but it sure didn't help that we weren't being counted as excellent "Smart" TV shows get canceled while we keep getting more seasons of Survivor. Who we are and how we live causes us to not be counted, and this has unintended consequences.
So what do we do? I wish I had a good answer to this. My first suggestion would be that if anyone mentions Alexa to you that you freak out and go on a 5-minute rant about how Alexa is stupid and anyone who is using it to seriously make a business decision should be fired. It doesn't actually help, but i estimate that every time I do this, I burn the same number of calories as I might on an elliptical trainer. I assure you the beer gut ain't getting smaller on its own.
Alternatively you could just install the toolbar on every machine you can find and skew the numbers ridiculously towards people that are likely unrepresented. Of course, the conspiracy theorists amongst you will just bitch that I'm trying to fudge Slashdot's own rankings in a system I'm claiming to hate. But that only helps proves my point... the conspiracy theorist is a demographic strongly represented on Slashdot that is unlikely to trust this software. We all ignore a broken status quo "Gold" standard that would fail a 100 level college science class on the grounds of flawed methodology. And this only leads to us not being counted.
Isn't Alexa considered spyware?
It baffles me how people actually look to them for information, considering how they get it.
That's all true, but unless someone's got a better alternative, it doesn't matter.
It isn't surprising that people who spend money on advertising want to have some metric by which to predict (estimate, guess, what-have-you) the impact of each dollar spent on web advertising. Assuming the people spending the money are, as a class, either stupid or ignorant is a mistake. Odds are good that many of them know that Alexa is flawed, but also consider any information better than nothing. If nothing else, Alexa rankings demonstrate the relative popularity of a web site among Alexa participants - which is at least a concrete demographic, and the stats are inarguable on that basis.
What's being missed is that there's a fundamental problem, here. Populations which refuse to share information with such aggregators will always self-select against representation. It's no different, really, than stating that populations who do not vote self-select against being represented in government. That doesn't stop us from using elections as a way to select people into government.
In the specific case of slashdot selecting against itself, it's debatable whether we're a demographic many organizations would even want to target (with web advertising) if they could. How many comments on how many stories have included someone claiming that he's either unaffected by or negatively affected by advertising? That he's less likely to buy a product he sees advertised? Broader yet, how do you suppose the median number of lifetime banner ad clicks for the slashdot user compares to that of the web-using population at large?
I posit that we pose a particularly galling challenge to marketers. On the one hand (if you'll allow me a bit of net-cultural hubris), we're a demographic of above-average intelligence, above-average income, with an above-average tendency to spend money on brand new technology, and who have an above-average impact on what other people will buy. On the other, we refuse to share our habits with "big brother," we're easily offended (eg, we hate proprietary formats solely because they're proprietary), comparatively hard to bamboozle, and have a cultural predisposition towards "free" (both beer and speech). That is, on the one hand, we're a fantastic demographic to succeed with, but on the other, we're a tough nut to crack.
The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. (Yes, I do realize that Nielsen is specifically flawed with respect to DVRs - but even if they weren't, how many members of this site would voluntarily install habit-tracking software on their TiVo? How many members of this site would call for a boycott of TiVo if it installed it for them?)
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
That's probably why it's filed under 'Editorial'.
... but what is Alexa ?
Will have to reread this, but it doesnt come off as news but a rant. And no I wont install the toolbar.
"Rant" ?
CmdrTaco is being rebel, anti-establishment, rage against the machine, fuck the system! This is what he's done here, and he deserves *respect* old man.
Back in the days, when we were pissed about religion, wars and social injustice, we dressed like goths and sang bad rock and roll and emo music.
But today, thanks to the world wide web, we take the next level, and all this unrelenting energy in today's youth comes in the form of a rant against a toolbar that rates sites. And I say, bravo.
Of course it's a rant, it's an editorial. /rant.
The tags were there before TFA.
Furthermore you will need to re-read it because of your race to FP you likely only read the front page blurb.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
...because digg.com is beating slashdot.org :)
When I used to administer a website (b2b, you've never heard of it) my boss loved Alexa. I told him time and again to uninstall it, and even did so myself a number of times... but he'd put it back every time. Then, one day, all dynamic content on the main page just vanished. I brought it back from backup, and chocked it up to a bug. Then, it happened again a little while later. I started snooping around our logs.
Turns out, Alexa's spiders were ignoring the robots.txt file, and capturing usernames and passwords. It logged into the administrative area, and followed the "delete" link for every entry. My dumbass boss still didn't want to uninstall Alexa. Could have strangled the man.
Don't worry, you'll be able to re-read it tomorrow when Zonk makes a dupe post.
My first suggestion would be that if anyone mentions Alexa to you that you freak out and go on a 5-minute rant about how Alexa is stupid and anyone who is using it to seriously make a business decision should be fired.
I've been doing this for years. The problem (or actually just what marketers perceive as the problem) is that there is no generic public way to compare web site traffic. The only true way to get traffic metrics is from the web site owners. And they could easily make it up to take in more advertisers. So people in advertising look to Alexa as the only third party source.
The biggest sites don't have as much of a problem because they can work closely with advertising partners. Medium and small sites, however, don't get as much personal attention. So proving themselves as worthy web space for ads is more difficult.
The only people I've heard of that install the Alexa toolbar are web site owners because they want to see their rank often. Ironically so few people have the toolbar installed that they drastically boost their own rank.
We need to convince marketers that Alexa is pointless. But I'm afraid that without a good replace they'll keep using it.
Developers: We can use your help.
He says install it, and then in the very next sentence says that he know you won't, because you're a Slashdot reader. The entire rest of the post is about why Alexa is flawed and shouldn't be used for anything by anyone.
Sure, from a purely mercenary point of view he'd like you to install it so that advertisers stupid enough to use Alexa will see Slashdot's traffic represented, but he acknowledges that you almost certainly won't. Taco has never had the kind of relationship with his readership to where he could tell them to do something and they would go out and do it, unless that "something" was "post goatse links to Slashdot," and I'm pretty sure he knows that.
Come on folks, it's time to be counted!
Now where can I download the Alexa plugin for lynx?
Oops.
I hate to say it, but that really proves not as much that "The only way advertisers can get accurate data as people opt in", as it proves that they have not elected to find new methods to track data properly/independantly. If you were able to develop a way to get honest and accurate data of the number of hits on a site to site basis, would even that be more accurate? (assuming you started to collect an enormous list of sites). Say check all the news aggregator websites language by language (I'm sure there's thousands in each), but rank them by who is getting the most unique hits in a day, etc? Of course a site could skew their own results which creates its own problem but would this not at least be more valuable than alexa data?
So Alexa says they are not spying on the user. Big surprise.
How can I verify what this toolbar is really doing unless I have the source code? IMHO the problem lies there: There is no trust for Alexa because nobody can really say for sure how it works and that it doesn't harm the user.
How is Alexa different than any other selective-survey system? The Nielsen ratings are acquired via 'diaries' (or occasionally set-top boxes). Radio 'listener share' is determined similarly by Arbitron. The NY-Times bestseller list is based on books sold to distributors, not books sold to the public (millions of unsold 'bestsellers' get pulped or donated to libraries every ear).
Just come to terms with the fact these organizations are in bed with advertisers and move on with you life.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
"Of course since most of you are Slashdot readers..."
hm... given the context I would say 'most' is an understatement
"It isn't surprising that people who spend money on advertising want to have some metric by which to predict (estimate, guess, what-have-you) the impact of each dollar spent on web advertising."
There are several easy ways:
If you're so naive as to not insist on hard numbers for actual views (the log files are best , you deserve to get hosed - you can analyse the log files and factor out multiple views per host ip to get the actual number of real views, and reduce fraud; ditto with geolocation of ip addresses to factor out bots in 3rd world countries; ditto for bots that crawl every link on a page; ditto for pages that are loaded then immediately dumped for another page).
As an advertiser, I'd want unique eyeballs - real human eyeballs - that can be verified.
Kevin Smith on Prince
In my experience, a lot of PHBs are only too happy to have information. They don't really care if it's valid information or not, just so long as it's there and that it sounds good.
It was a massive wake-up call to realise how many middle-managers and the like will quite happily swallow any old crap as long as they perceive that it's authoritative. Has anyone ever tried to tell them about how bad the information is? (real question btw - I'm interested in seeing if other readers experiences were as bleak as mine).
bang goes my karma... again...
It clearly has biases, and (worse) these seem to change slowly with time, but for the web sites I host, there is a nice correlation between their Alexa reach and their
hit count.
It is certainly good for a crude ranking of sites - Slashdot's rank right now is 558, and that clearly means a lot more traffic than some site than a rank of 5 million.
So, like many other measures on the Internet, it is flawed, but it has value.
I would LOVE to have a similar scenario for other ad-driven media. Imagine if I could flag TV commercials with "not interested" and then never see that commercial again, or any commercial for a similar product. Once it got a good feel for what I really like and don't like, I probably wouldn't feel the need to skip commercials. The same could be said of web ads. If I could cherry-pick which ads I was interested in and which I wasn't I might not be so inclined to block ALL of them.
Ads are useful to me sometimes, but picking the signal out of the noise is usually such a hassle that I'd rather just skip the whole process. If everyone could make a very personal statement about what they want to see ads for and what they don't, I think the benefit for both parties would improve.
Symantec corporate flags the alexa toolbar as spyware, so I couldn't run it if I desired to.
. jsp?docid=2004-062410-3624-99
http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Alexa targets a demographic which are more likey to click on banner ads and buy the junk which they advertise. So for the advertisers targeting those demographics I'm sure it works out ok.
Of course a site could skew their own results which creates its own problem but would this not at least be more valuable than alexa data?
No, it wouldn't, and you've already stated why. Everyone knows that web site logs are the single most accurate way of measuring web site traffic. And no one uses them anyway - not because they think Alexa collects better data, but Alexa doesn't have a vested interest in making a given site look better than it is.
A system which counts on the person selling to give you an honest evaluation of the worth of their product is never going to be more accepted than one involving a third party.
You're right, however, in that what's really needed is a better way to track visits to web sites. The problem is that we can't trust the buy-in of the owners, because they're (obviously) biased. Also, we can't trust the opt-in of the visitors, because so many of them don't opt-in. So the question becomes, what sources of information do we have?
I don't have an answer to that question. And, based on the lack of third-party ratings systems other than Alexa, I don't know that anyone else has that answer, either.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I'd argue it is rather different. TV is one way. Your television browsing habits are slightly less revealing than say, your banking activities or the blog entries you post.
Also, Alexa claims to give you some value in exchange for letting them piggy back on your browsing. Nielsen is more public and more respected. This helps mitigate the sampling problems.
Suck it up and find a better metric for your boss.If his "boss" (or any of the other scores of people who accost him about the popularity of websites) would let him pick the metric, he wouldn't have this problem.
The point of the article is that he has to defend someone else's choice of metric.
Or perhaps, the point is more of an "Ask Slashdot" sort of thing...
As in, "Hey all you /. geeks, what's a better way to do this?" Taco's comments on the flaws in Alexa's system and Control Group's comments on some of the particular challenges against this demographic in general support that.
Heck.. it seems like an interesting enough problem to me, but then again, I don't have a sig like yours:
/.: "Anti-Microsoft Rants, Apple and Google d*ck sucking." Pathetic.If you hate it that much, why are you hanging out here?
(Sorry, I really need to stop feeding the trolls...)
Erskin
geek.
Slashdot is an extremely popular website with great demographics. It should be a huge money maker but it probably under performs.
It doesn't show up all that well in Alexa because very few people that go to Slashdot use or would use the Alexa toolbar.
It probably doesn't show up all that well with the advertisers because Slashdot readers are technically very sophisticated.
What percentage of Slashdot users are blocking the ads on Slashdot? 80%? Slashdot should be the "Myspace" of the technical crowd. Heck it had the friends list long before Myspace was around. We have our Journals "aka" blogs so yea it is a little Myspace full of bright people with money to spend. But it doesn't make that much money. Slashdot should be worth many millions but it isn't. The real problem isn't Alexa but how can Slashdot live up to it's potental for that evil word. Profit. After all I am sure the Slashdot crew would like to make the big bucks.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And add to this mix that we collectively HATE advertising. So we all use ad blockers, flash blockers, script blockers, image blockers, and anything else we can find which reduces or eliminates advertising which gets in the way of reading the content of a web site.
So even if we do get "counted" and the advertisers can determine what it is that we browse, the current method of "in your face" ads will quickly push us towards a way of either blocking the ads, or simply not going there any more.
And I DO click on ads, but only if they are:
- NOT in the way of the content
- NOT blinking, flashing, moving
- NOT trying to distract my eye towards them
If ANY of the above happen, I am gone from the site, and will NEVER go there again.
(Hey, this is my 1,000th post. Woo Hoo!)
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Yes the reason digg has a higher page rank on alexia is because the average digg user is almost universally less technically savy then the average slashdot user. No I am not being sarcastic, they are dumber.
A slashdot debate on bush and the war, for example, will use complete word and sentances and sometimes include facts. A crazy rant it might be but a crazy READABLE rant.
The same debate on digg...
bush = leet haxor
STFU, WAR IS BAD, OBAMA 08 WOOT.
Sure, but that all presupposes you've already bought ad space on the site in question. When you're trying to select which web sites to purchase ad space on in the first place, you don't have access to any of those metrics. If we were talking about a handful of key sites, that wouldn't be a problem - test the waters, go with what works.
But given the huge number of web sites out there that run ads, you need some way of doing an initial selection of which ones to pay. Hence Alexa.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Quite right. Not Alexa's fault.
As a statistician, I can reassure you that the only thing that's worse than no data is flawed data. When you have no data, you know something is wrong and you start correcting that. When you have flawed data, you don't. Instead you use that data and build on it, never knowing that what you measure, calculate and estimate has nothing to do with reality. In other words, it can be dangerous, to your job and the company you're working for.
Imagine the (flawed) data you have tells you that almost 100% of the people visiting your geek-gadget page are fans of some rock group. Why? Because they use a proxy that was written by some fan of said rock group whose proxy subtly alters the meta information sent by your browser to tell everyone you surf to how much you like said rock group. You analyze it and invest heavily into marketing crap from said group, hoping that your customers will buy it since they all appearantly love that group.
Result? Big desaster. Nobody buys it. Nobody even knows that group. They just all used the same proxy/plugin/younameit, not even knowing that whoever wrote it wanted to advertise his favorite band.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're telling me - rants drive me absolutely nuts, especially on this site. They don't make good reading, they pointlessly waste your time, and they use up valuable screen real estate that could be occupied by other, more interesting stories. The methodology behind rants us usually utterly broken but, for reasons unclear to anyone, are regarded as 'postable material' on all too many sites. I mean, let's not draw the line at Slashdot. Rants show up on:
That we obviously need to abandon rants is clear, because they're almost always pointless, but there are so many of them these days that it gets to the point where the only metric you're using to compare sites is the quality of its rants. This is entirely flawed and meaningless, and leaves me wanting a stiff drink. Still, don't get me started on their frequency on /. You're all Slashdot readers, most of you just go ahead and prove my point anyway.
So say you go to some random site and end up reading a rant. What have you learned. After you close your browser, are you any more complete as a person? Have you grown intellectually. Let me think: no ... no. I'm not some some expert on rants and why I'm writing about them is very confusing, but I think I have as much to say about the dumb things as anyone. And if that bothers people, at least I got the point across.
Here's the problem: rants don't work. If you RTFA, and start with a place I'm very familiar with (namely Slashdot) like a quarter of you write rants anyway. And that's not even talking about the fact that any rant, and not all posts are rants, is going to take up people's time and not get modded very well anyway. How many Slashdot readers would mod a rant up? You either? Big surprise. Because of who we are, and what it is, our population will self select out of consideration.
Did you know rants can get posted by ANYONE? How about Anonymous Cowards? Now personally I'm glad of that, free speech and all. But anyway, those are my (heavily edited) thoughts on this.
If digg is "beating" slashdot, let it win. Maybe the YouTube popularity blog can suck away the idiots from slashdot.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I don't think that your story is a very good indicator of how rubbish Alexa is, it just highlights issues with your own system.
This is why you shouldn't use HTTP GET for 'delete links'. Anything that changes content should be POST, which will stop bots crawling your site just by following links from breaking things. We have standards for a reason..
As for alexa crawling your site as a logged in user, what? As far as I know the toolbar itself doesn't do any crawling, only reporting. Maybe it was providing links to Alexa that later got indexed, but if they were properly secured then you wouldn't have any issues. The fact that you seem to be relying on a robots.txt for security indicates bigger issues. The only time I've heard of a 'Toolbar' doing this kind of thing is when Google released their proxy service (which they later withdrew), as it automatically preloaded all pages - and again poorly designed pages using GET to modify data encountered problems just like yours.
trackware, not spyware, from your link: "is a program that installs a toolbar and gathers Internet browsing and search information." which is EXACTLY WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO DO in order to aggregate site popularity.
That's true if the person using the data is unaware that it's flawed. But an educated decision can be made to use data that's known to be flawed, if one evaluates what those flaws are, and what they'll mean to whatever it is you're doing.
In fact, as I think about it, I'm not sure "flawed" is the right word. The information is incomplete; whether that's a flaw depends on whether or not you recognize that you don't have all the information.
I think that assuming all the people using Alexa rankings to make purchasing decisions are stupid is misguided. I think it's a much safer assumption that the distribution of stupid, average, and intelligent people among that population is fairly close to that of the population at large. Many of them are making decisions based, in part, on having information that they know to be incomplete, which they judge to be preferable to making decisions based on having no information.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
My irony meter just broke, and you owe me a new one.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Let me save you some breath, I deal with non-technical small online business owners all day, every day, and I have for the last 7 years - they are obviously concerned with Alexa rankings.
.NET FRAMEWORK.
I *HAVE* been telling them that the stats are bullshit, not only for the reasons listed above but a few others - but eventually I gave up and developed a better strategy:
Don't bother explaining highly technical concepts to a monkey, it frustrates you and annoys the monkey.
If your pointy haired boss wants your Alexa ranking to improve I would suggest you:
1) Call a meeting, invite as many department heads as you can.
2) Make the problem your own, and phrase it as *MASSIVE*, *DIRE*, *EXTREME* (e.g. if we don't fix this, we could all be out of a job soon)
3) Suggest IMMEDIATE ACTION be taken, suggest hiring an offshore team of workers (China $0.37/hr) to install the Alexa toolbar and surf around your site.
4) Recommend that the company consider an immediate payout a Ukranian hacker with mob ties named "Ivan" who will pwn machines and install alexa and then randomly pop your site on his botnet for a reasonable fee.
5) Finally tell them that bribes to key employees in Alexa may be necessary - tell them you may have a contact and tell them to be ready to authorize six digit sums of money in a 24 hour period if necessary. [this can be useful for other reasons]
Trust me - as soon as the first mention of money (and specifically who's budget it will come out of) is made the general attitude toward how important Alexa is will change. They'll backpedal, claim you're being overly-proactive. They'll produce some rant they found on a website called dot-slash saying how Alexa rankings aren't important.
Tell them it's all propaganda, proceed to ignore whatever they say -- pronounce your undying love for Alexa - and it's relevance to the web.
DEMAND THEY RESPECT YOUR AUTHORITY.
IDENTIFY YOURSELF AS THE BIG DOG OF TECHNOLOGY.
ASK WHO ELSE GRADUATED FROM DEVRY LIKE YOU DID?
WHO ELSE IN THE ROOM IS A CERTIFIED NOVELL ADMINISTRATOR?
IF CHALLENGED BY ANYONE TAUNT THEM AND SAY THEY PROBABLY DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND BIG "NETWORKING" CONCEPTS LIKE SECURE SOCKETS LAYER, TRANSPORT CONTROL PROTOCOL, AND
Then proceed to tell them that (in your professional opinion) your company won't be able to recruit good people because of your poor Alexa ranking. Tell them that search engines will stop spidering your site, and eventually your traffic will drop to zero. Without a good alexa ranking your email will get caught in more spam filters and you'll appear on blacklists and phishing filters more frequently. That means the SSL locks won't show up on browsers anymore. This will cause packet loss on your routers to increase. If it's not fixed immediately it's possible eventually your domain won't even work if somebody enters it directly into their browser. ALEXA IS THE MASTER OF THE INTERNET THEY ARE ALL KNOWING WE MUST SERVE THEM WITHOUT QUESTION.
ps> I *seriously* did have one customer who hired an offshore Indian firm to boost they're rankings (no bullshit) - feel free to mention that your competitors are already doing this, and the clock is ticking. WE NEED A DECISION NOW.
The next topic: PAGE RANK (umm.. wash, rinse, repeat)
I have gotten numerous sites into the top 75k of Alexa ratings by simply installing the toolbar on a couple of machines and regularly browsing through the entire site. On the other hand, I have sites that receive 3000 unique hits a day ranked around 300,000 on Alexa. That being said, I still use Alexa all the time to figure out which sites are well trafficked, and I imagineit is far more accurate than the author is giving it credit for. If you eliminate obvious exceptions (sites that cater to SEO folk and sites that cater to certain audiences such as Linux users) I think you will find that Alexa makes for a useful although not 100% accurate tool.
It's the quality, not the quantity of your audience that matters. Despite the occasional trolling and flaming that goes on at Slashdot, it still uphold its audience as the most informed and highly intelligent. I can't say that for Digg.com.
Life is not for the lazy.
I dislike pointless rants as much as the next person, but I feel like you can at least give a little credence to posts like this. I'd imagine it's extremely frustrating dealing with this type of thing; the general reader doesn't really have any idea that this is a problem (I've been reading /. on an hourly basis for the past 4 years, but it' always possible that I just never paid enough attention to hear about this), but apparently it's something that he has to deal with on a regular basis. If he's making a post on the main page, it's obviously something that he feels is a serious issue and he's looking to the community for support and feedback. Rag on Slashdot all you want, but if you're posting on this then you obviously read it a good deal and hopefully get useful/interesting information from it. Why can't a founder of such an excellent (in my opinion) site complain and ask for feedback on an issue that's obviously important and causes serious problems in a way that most likely the users and the admins never anticipated or know how to deal with? Maybe if we all were running 640x480 or browsing with Lynx we could legitimately complain about the post taking up important news space, but in the majority we're not, and in addition Slashdot caters to such a wide variety of readers that you're never going to be interested in every single news post on the front page, even with the customizations. (if you are then I want your job).
On that note, I don't actually have anything to say about the topic at hand, but then again, neither did the parent.
Then don't use Alexa. You can measure traffic in ways beyond toolbars. Try the following:
1) Compete. It is free. It uses toolbars AND panels AND isps. It's not that accurate compared to Comscore.. but maybe Comscore is wrong.
2) Buy something. Comscore uses a panel method with a careful demographic spread so they can extrapolate from their sample with a small percent-error.
3) Buy Hitwise for percentages. It doesn't give you unique visitors, but it can give you comparisons and ranks and whatnot. They lay on top of ISPs and use a few panels. It is 20-30K for a year or so.
4) Wait awhile until the IAB's audit leads to some common definitions and standards among the aforementioned companies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and Media Rating Council are auditing Nielsen and Comscore to make sure there is more transparency into what defines all these metrics, how they are counted, and how they should be counted, forever after. In a few years, there might be some consistency in the industry, which will at least stop you from comparing apples and oranges once you get beyond over-counting SEO spammers.
If you are concerned about the demographics and unselfconscious web surfing, you need to go with a company that looks at ISP data. That's right, everyone -- your service contracts with larger ISPs allow them to anonymously watch your traffic and sell it to companies like Hitwise with your demographic information. Suddenly, the 35-54 white male demographic with a 80K income in the south can be fully represented in the balloon-popping video site genre, until they start hiding behind a proxy. Because it is anonymous, it is even better than a panel, because they don't know they are being watched and don't change their behavior.
There's a neat thing in journalism. Editors retain the privilege of being able to commandeer any space they want in their publication, and say just about anything they want. In the format of Slashdot, the editorial would take the top most position on the page, until a newer story filled the position.
I have been known to do the same thing on my site. It may be a "thank you" to our users. It may be a birth, death, or wedding announcement. It may just be that a particular topic has infuriated me to the extent that I needed to put my opinion in big bold letters on the front page, because no matter how much we may report on the topic, people still don't have a clue about the meaning.
If Cmdr Taco had posted a news story on the poor metrics used by Alexa, would that have received the same attention that his own personal account did?
Unfortunately, he's echoing what many of us already feel. Boss type people feel the need to rank high with Alexa. If the ranking goes down for any reason, they want it brought back up. Even on some of the lesser technical sites, discussions start about spyware, and people start removing these utilities. When that happens, the score for those sites drop, and the score for AOL.com and Disney.com go up. (when's the last time you de-spywared the kids computer?)
I know from reliable information, that my news site is read heavily by those in the intelligence services around the world. I sincerely hope that they wouldn't have the Alexa toolbar on their machines. Most of our users are very aware of what's happening around them. They're the ones that are careful to keep their machines clean of viruses and spyware. That leaves us with the random users who follow links from other news sites, or find us in search engines. Maybe they'll stick around. Maybe they'll even learn something.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
That won't work well with ads in general, because your desires change over time. For example, you'll be interested in car ads only when you're considering buying a new car.
Also, people like me would just vote every ad down until we didn't have to see anything. If I want to see advertisements for a product I'LL GO LOOK FOR IT.
Always was, always will be. After decades, there is no agreed upon methodology for tracking the effectiveness of marketing dollars in the real world. The internet should make it easier, right? Perhaps, until people learn how to filter the internet. Doubleclick never sees me, because I have
in my hosts file, along with 37,000 other crap sites. I also add "*urchin\.js" to my custom filters in FilterSetG, so AdSense doesn't see me. I suspect other Slashdotters take similar measures.
If a good click through rate on a banner ad is less than 1%, and only about 1% of clicks result in a sale, then the value of that banner to the advertiser is only .01% of it's cost (yes, I know AdSense works differently, but it has its own pitfalls). Pathetic, isn't it?
It makes you wonder how poorly traditional media ads actually perform.
Banner ads, I'm pretty sure, are the first time advertisers have ever been able to measure the returns on ad dollars. Some company spends $20k for a full page ad in a magazine, how much of that came back in sales? No one knows. So just to me sure they don't lose sales, the company continues to buy ads, following some rough percentage of revenues. Demographics is the closest thing marketers have to concrete data... it basically says not to buy ads in Ladies' Home Journal if you're selling vintage car parts. Even then, demographics measures potential returns before the fact, not actual returns after the fact. So, advertising is a wild goose chase based on assumptions, and no one does, or can, really know what's going on.
The internet should be a wake up call for advertisers to the fact that their marketing budgets are being overinflated by... (wait for it) the ad agencies and marketing firms. Sadly no one will realize this, because the foxes are in charge of the henhouse, and claim everyone will fall to ruin otherwise.
Generally, people don't want the crap in the ads, and would rather not even see the ads. Horrible conversion rates prove this. The scariest part of Minority Report, other than the nanny-state concept of "pre-crime", is the level of advertising present everywhere in the film, targeted at individuals with laser-like precision. It got that way because the public allowed it to happen.
The simplest way to fix advertising is to remove all imperative and presumptuous statements from them. No more "Call now!", "You need...", "But wait, there's more!" obnoxious mind games. I'm not calling, I don't need your shit, and I'm not waiting for you to yell at me some more.
As a statistician, I can reassure you that the only thing that's worse than no data is flawed data. When you have no data, you know something is wrong and you start correcting that. When you have flawed data, you don't.
This is a huge assumption that I'd say is incorrect more often than not.
Your entire argument as it stands now presupposes that the advertiser doesn't know the data is flawed. But what if he does?
My company buys lots of web ads. We use Alexa as one of our data sources (not the only one) to determine ad buys, both because it's free and because in our experience, its data is no more or less accurate than that of paid vendors like Nielsen. Do we expect 100% accuracy? No. Do we think we can learn anything if, for example, it tells us that two directly competing sites have traffic that's different by about 200% in every metric? Probably.
Buying ads is not an exact science. It doesn't really matter if we get accurate traffic down to the individual click. All we're looking for is relativity - a site's size and reach compared to its competitors. We look at the sites themselves, we look at Alexa and we look at research that we commission and pay for. Usually these sources all agree and we go ahead and buy. In the event that they don't agree, we use our own critical thinking and our own judgment to determine what to believe - that is part of any marketer's job, after all.
It seems to me that this whole article here is missing the point. Alexa's a tool. A free tool. It is useful at what it does, but it is not, nor was it ever intended to be, some sort of accurate measure of site statistics for the entire internet. Nobody who uses it as part of their decision-making process is using it that way.
I think this is a case where somebody looked at Alexa, figured out that it wasn't perfect, and therefore determined that it's utter crap. That's basically what your argument boils down to also. But the point is we don't need perfection, and we don't expect perfection, and this lack of perfection is taken into account in our decision making process. We're not flying to the moon here; we're buying ad space. It's something of an organic process regardless of how good your data is.
If you're talking about somebody using Alexa for their own site, then that's just ridiculous. Even cheap hosting accounts (like I have for my personal site) come with their own log-based stats, and if not, there are plenty of free services like Statcounter out there. I don't think this is what many people use Alexa for, though; it's used more by small to mid-sized companies looking for sites on which to buy ads, or by curiosity seekers who just want to see how big their favorite sites are. I would think most sites would know what their own internal numbers are one way or another, without Alexa.
When talking about technological things like page-ranking and Alexa's use on that, yes. Yes they are.
It's not that they are dumb in the wide version of the word, but in the techfield, Digg is arguably "dumber" than Slashdot. Try the same argumentation on Slashdot vs. MySpace.
When I talk about my hobby or profession, I like to single out the 99% that doesn't understand a word from what I'm saying.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
CmdrTaco wrote:
:)
Equally perplexing is the accounting of iframes. Let's look at someone like double click's alexa rating. Now it's hard to say, but I don't think I've ever visited their website. Have you? But according to Alexa, they have nearly a 1% share of the internet. I'd tend not to believe it...
That's not surprising to me at all. I don't think this is because of all the iframes that pop up on pages, or they would have a much higher percentage than 1%. I think it's actual ad clicks. When you click an ad, you go to a doubleclick link which will redirect you to the advertiser's page. If all those ad clicks are counted as actual traffic, 1% is actually a very believable figure.
And I've never heard of Alexa until now
m
If you really want good Alexa ratings, just put a link to the toolbar at the top of slashdot.org. Soon you'll probably be in the top 20.
Sparky. It's called Sparky. http://www.alexa.com/site/download
This is for CmdrTaco and anyone else who wants to read it.
Dude, it's the paradigm that sucks, not Alexa per se. Consider Nielsen ratings: would you or any self-respecting Slashdotter actually be so foolish as to agree to be a "Nielsen family"? I doubt it. It's the same dynamic at play. I blogged about the relative stupidity of Nielsen families in particular a while back; those people are ruining my ability to enjoy quality programming like Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond, Keen Eddie, and countless others because of their mindless plebeian tastes.
These are also the same people who often cause unreasonable pricing for consumer items, because they're too stupid to know when to vote with their dollars and just say "no". "$70 for a set of warmed-over LucasFilm Star Wars films that already turned a profit three times over? No problem, I simply *must* have them!"
As a result, manufacturers set prices based on this same mindless demographic; those of us who are "smart" consumers, who could wrangle a better fairer price, are dragged along for the ride kicking and screaming.
That's kinda what has happened here: you (CmdrTaco) are being dragged along kicking - and screaming - by all the Alexoids, and you don't like that any more than I like having Firefly yanked off the air.
I'm quietly of the suspicion that national and especially online advertising is only a fraction as profitable as corporations think it is. I suspect if someone could do a truly objective cost-benefit analysis of mass advertising, like car commercials on TV, we'd find that it's actually costing money that is never rewarded in equivalent sales, and for which we're all ultimately footing the bill in the form of higher prices to pay down all that pointless advertising.
Solving the "Alexa dilemma" just might require eugenics or some other speciation event.
At W3C we log almost everything as well, and we end up with way too much data as a result.
But we use the logs to detect and prevent certain classes of abuse as well (e.g. too many requests in a short time interval or re-requesting the same resources over and over), and we also want to be able to track trends over time, so we have been reluctant to just throw that data away.
I have a plan that I have yet to implement, which is to log only 0.001% of the requests for certain very popular resources (e.g. HTML DTDs and valid-HTML icons), which would allow us to monitor trends without logging tens of gigs of data per day; we'd just need to compensate for it when calculating stats later.
Then I planned to monitor for abuse by also logging every request to a script that watches for abusive traffic patterns, an easy adaptation from the current script that wakes up and skims the logs every 10 mins.
(in your journal entry, when you say you are MD5ing IP addresses for privacy reasons, are you adding a random bit of data to the IP address before calcuating the MD5? If not it's pretty easy to find out which IP address corresponds to a given MD5 sum.)
No problem. You can use my goldy meter or my bronzy meter. They're just like your irony meter, only they're made of gold and bronze.
John