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 When you get that alert that a plug-in is out of date do you just forget about it?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.
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'.
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 :)
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.
Come on folks, it's time to be counted!
Now where can I download the Alexa plugin for lynx?
Oops.
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.
Alexa is a ranking system to measure how popular a certain website is on the Internet. A user, however, must have the Alexa toolbar installed for Alexa to measure site rankings accordingly. As of right now, Slashdot is ranked 558 out of 1 million+ sites that Alexa tracks.
Note: you don't need to install the toolbar to figure out Alexa rankings. Check out the Search Status extension for Firefox. I have mine sitting at the bottom right corner of the browser to display me PageRank and Alexa rankings.
"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
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...
I'm just ragging on you unnecessarily here -- but was Alexa following POSTed form actions or something? This is why there's a completely different verb for the alteration or deletion of a URI object (POST) vs reading one (GET). (And shame on somebody for sticking usernames and passwords in GET variables, if that was the case.) /nitpick
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.
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.
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.
There's no better path to profit than courting an audience of people who's explicit goal is to destroy the monetary value of software.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
On larger sites, doing things like collecting / reading web site logs (like your apache log files) is completely unrealistic. We don't even have them turned on here anymore, because they generate so much disk i/o and flood so much disk space (each of our web heads when we last had logging enabled over a year ago produced over 8 gb of apache logs every day - multiply that times 30 and that's a hell of a log parse every single day...) - so we tend to gauge traffic more in megabits per second than anything else.
/. has similar logging problems.
I am not saying that Alexa is good for looking at traffic trends either - their numbers vary WILDLY from what our actuals are. Oddly enough, Hitwise does a much better job, but I suspect that is a lot of blind luck on their part as I think they take data in a similar fashion.
I'm not sure I had a point, except that web logs aren't really feasible when your traffic crosses a threshold - I'm sure
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
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)
Hi Mandrake.
Slashdot still logs every pageview (plus ajax). We drop them into MySQL and once a day run a data-massaging script on them then delete the oldest portion. We do have a pair of dedicated servers for this, but generally speaking the I/O is pretty low. It's very doable.
One of the main reasons is detecting abuse in real-time (done by more scripts that run more frequently). I wrote a journal entry about one of those scripts, a while back.
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.
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.