You may have noticed there tended to be some wild Alexa ranking fluctuations lately. For example, Techmeme went from being close to 100,000 Alexa to about 10,000 instantly.  While many people don’t appreciate Alexa much anymore given the increase in other competitive services that assign a ranking to websites such as Technorati, Compete, Quantcast, etc.  But I still prefer to use Alexa as a good way to determine the valuation of blogs and other websites.  For example if I see a website that is over 20,000 on Alexa I can only assume it gets lots of hits and could make quite a bit of money based on its traffic.

Now Alexa has overhauled their system to give more advanced analytical information regarding the websites they track.  For example on top of the countries that most users come from, there is contact info, related links, keywords, clickstream, and demographics.  This is impressive considering that Alexa does not need websites to install a piece of code to track the analytics.

Other information provided by Alexa’s analytics system include daily traffic rank, reach, average pageviews per visitor, bounce %, average time spent on the site per visitor, and the % of users that arrive on the website through a search engine.  All things considered, I still heavily judge how important a website is by its Alexa ranking.  Alexa is owned by Amazon.com.

Amazon.com’s Alexa Internet Inc. subsidiary company is usually very reliable.  However, there was a temporary outage that caused some concern to many online publications.  Between May 20 and June 3, Alexa was not reporting updated traffic rankings on a daily basis.

Alexa is best known for their toolbar, an add-on to browsers that report a site’s 3 month ranking and harvests data for generating rankings.  On May 23, Alexa updated their toolbar for Firefox 3.0.

Amazon bought Alexa for $250 million in Amazon.com stock in 1999.  Alexa Internet is based in San Francisco, Calif.

The Internet traffic measurement company, Alexa Internet, Inc. has been down for quite some time now.  Today is June 1 and Alexa’s Internet traffic rankings has not updated since May 19.

Normally, Alexa updates daily.  Why isn’t Alexa updating?  There hasn’t been an official announcement, but Allen Stern’s theory is that they might be pulling a Twitter.

There is a sign of life at the company.  I received a notification from the Firefox browser that Alexa launched Sparky version 1.2.1, a plugin that works with Firefox 3.0 in the status bar.

I’m assuming that Alexa’s actual Internet traffic rankings should be working again soon.  This post will be updated when I notice that Alexa starts becoming functional again.

“In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!” wrote Geoffrey Mack on the Alexa Blog.

Alexa statistics have shifted and the bloggers were some of the first people to react. First thing I noticed was that TechCrunch’s rank felt about 1,000 and it’s ranking is now comparable to LifeHacker.com’s. This seems like an accurate assumption since at one point, TechCrunch was transparent with their hits and LifeHacker still is. Around the time I compared TechCrunch’s hits on SiteMeter vs. LifeHacker’s, I found that TechCrunch’s hits were less than half yet still had a much higher Alexa ranking.

Based on the new ranking that Alexa assigned Pulse 2.0, it seems like a fairly accurate assumption as well. Over the last couple months, Pulse 2.0’s Alexa ranking was falling, but hits were increasing overall. Today, our ranking jumped from 156,000 to 102,000. I think that Alexa is accounting for our overall increase in hits now.

Great job, Alexa team!

Taylor Nelson Sofres, a London, England based market research company has paid $75 million to have Compete.com integrated into their company.  Compete could receive an additional $75 million in earn-outs through 2010 as well [Source: Techcrunch].

Compete.com mines data from 2 million Compete Toolbar users to monitor online behavior.  TNS will use this data for the purpose of providing extra services to their own clients.

Compete.com will remain operating as a stand-alone company.  Compete raised $43 million in capital since 2000 from various venture capital firms including Charles River Ventures, Commonwealth Capital, Chicago Growth Partners, and Split Rock Partners.

Competitors include Alexa, comScore, and Quantcast.  The power of analytics reporting has on Wall Street was recently demonstrated when comScore revealed a slip in Google Ads clicks.  GOOG stock dropped heavily shortly after comScore’s announcement.

Over the past couple weeks, there have been some interesting changes in the Alexa Top 10 Global sites.

Battle of The Searches With A Little Video Website In Between (1-5)
1.) Yahoo! has retained their #1 position.  They have millions of users chatting away on their Messenger software, watching Yahoo! Videos, listening to Yahoo! Music, and playing Yahoo! Games.  For Google or Microsoft to take away their user loyalty, it’ll be tough.  Microsoft seems this as being an issue, hence the $44.6 billion offer.

2.) YouTube is the most surprising of all.  YouTube surpassed Google, its own parent company.  This is an indication that everyone that uses the Internet all over the world is interested in video content now more than ever.  Google acquiring YouTube for $1.7 billion was such a bargain for the search company.  Considering that Yahoo! is worth $44.6 billion and they are one rank higher than YouTube, YouTube must be worth at least $30 billion today.  Video startups, this is your time.

3.) Live.com.  This ranking was inevitable for them since Microsoft switched a majority of their online services under this domain name.  Hotmail is now Mail.Live.com, MSN Messenger is now Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces is their free blogging platform, etc.

4.) Google dropped by 1.  They are still in the close running against Microsoft and Yahoo!, but YouTube made up for their fall.  Google could easily pass Live.com if they put YouTube under the Google.com domain, but that would just look ugly.  Imagine having a friend sending you an IM that says “Check out this video at http://YouTube.Google.com/watch?v=raGuLfAruNM” instead of “Check out this video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=raGuLfAruNM.”

5.) MSN.com is becoming the personalized arm for Microsoft.  MSN.com, a news portal also includes My.MSN.com, MSN Video.  MSN.com used to be #3, but is losing traction due to its sister-site, Live.com

The Social Networks And The Open Source Encyclopedia (6-10)
6.) MySpace.com is currently the world’s biggest social network and is owned by News Corp.  MySpace was originally an indie site made for musicians to connect with each other and was created by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe.  MySpace is now being used by News Corp. as real estate for advertisements.  News Corp. is also pushing the MySpace brand in major aired events like the Super Bowl.  During the Super Bowl, it was pointed out that advertisements can be watched on MySpace.com/SuperBowlAds

7.) Facebook is the $15 billion valuated social network that is now an exclusive advertisement partner with Microsoft.   Facebook quickly lifted the mat from under MySpace.  In the last 2 years, Facebook started allowing applications and allowed anyone to register for their site, characteristics that were very MySpace and Friendster-like.  But Facebook has grown rapidly on the Alexa top sites and those are a couple of the reasons.  Will Facebook beat MySpace within the next few months?  Very likely.

8.) Hi5 is one of the biggest social networks in Latin America.  The company has 98 million users and was founded by Ramu Yalamanchi in 2002.   Hi5 recently launched a Chinese version of their site and raised $15 million last month.

9.) Wikipedia is the most well-known use of open-source today.  Content on Wikipedia is all provided by its users.  The company was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.  By the end of 2007, Wikipedia had 9.25 million articles written in 253 languages.  Not too shabby for a 7 year old online encyclopedia.

10.) Orkut, another Google property founded by Orkut Büyükkökten is another social network. This is also the most visited web site in Brazil.  I bet if you go to an Internet Cafe in Brazil, at least half the people will visit Orkut at least once or twice, just like if you go to any college campus in America, you’ll see Facebook loaded on many of the screens in the libraries.  As a matter of fact, 55% of all Orkut’s traffic is from Brazil and 17% is from India.

The Alexa Blog is located at: http://awis.blogspot.com/.

I just noticed that on my Alexa.com toolbar (owned by Amazon.com), Google’s rank looked a little different.  The web information company’s toolbar was telling me that Google is no longer glazed in bronze.  It had a silver spoon in its mouth.  Oh for crying out loud, If you don’t get my metaphor, what I’m saying is that Google is now ranked #2 and MSN is ranked #3.

Alexa’s Global Top 10:
1.) Yahoo!
2.) Google
3.) MSN
4.) YouTube
5.) Live.com
6.) MySpace
7.) Orkut
8.) Facebook
9.) Wikipedia
10.) Hi5

Looking at the top 10 web sites, Google has the most presence on Alexa.  They are ranked #2 and they own #4 and #7.  Whereas, Microsoft only owns #3 and #5.  Google also has a presence on #6 because they have an exclusive advertising partnership with MySpace.com.  Microsoft counteracted that move by signing an exclusive partnership with #8 website, Facebook.com. It seems like both companies were playing with their domains a little bit over the last year or so.  We saw the rise of Live.com this past year and GMail.com shifted over to the Google.com servers.  Below is a chart comparison from Alexa:

Notice the instant growth of Live.com?  This is perhaps because Hotmail.com shifted over to Live.com servers.  Seeing as how Live.com is constantly growing and MSN.com is slipping a little bit, I’m curious to see what Microsoft will do with MSN to ensure it doesn’t slip more.  And also, what will Yahoo! do to maintain #1.  Over the next couple years, we should see some interesting changes in the Top 10, especially seeing as how it felt like YouTube and Wikipedia came out of nowhere and claimed their current spots.

Website rating system, Alexa.com, a subsidiary company of Amazon.com recently announced that their popular toolbar is now available for Mozilla Firefox. The announcement was made on Monday on the Alexa blog^[1], but I did not notice it until today. The new Firefox Alexa Toolbar is called Sparky.

Below is a screen shot of how it looks when installed. The screen shot was taken from the Sparky download page.

I used to have Smart PageRank Toolbar 1.0, but consider it gone now. Users who have Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.5 should beware that there is a compatibility issue, but one of the comments in the Alexa blog post tells how to bypass the problem.

[1] Alexa – Web Discovery Machine: Sparky Add-on for Firefox Released Today

A press release was sent out stating that Nielsen//NetRatings^[1], a solid source for online page view measurements, will halt monitoring user activity based on page views and will now focus the length of time spent. The official announcement by the company is expected to be made tomorrow. What this means is that because of today’s web technologies, web traffic rating and measurement companies need to start reconsidering the criteria set on determining which web sites are more popular than others.

The biggest example of such technologies is AJAX. AJAX is a technology in which users can take actions on particular websites without having to be redirected to multiple pages. Digg is an excellent example of such technology use. On the homepage of Digg, users can “digg” stories and a vote will be accumulated, all without having to leave www.digg.com:
Also, every story that is submitted on Digg has its own individual page where more AJAX is implemented:

Clicking on the Comments, Who Dugg or Blogged It?, Blog It, and Email It tabs do not require a user to be redirected to another page.

“Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic,” stated Scott Ross, Director of Product Marketing at Nielsen. “We’re changing our stance on how the data should be” used.

AOL LLC and Yahoo! Inc. also benefits from the upcoming changes by Nielsen//NetRatings. Nielsen will credit both services with the time spent on their messenger platforms. About 25 billion minutes was spent AOL Instant Messenger and 20 billion minutes were spent on Yahoo! Messenger service this past May.

Alexa Internet Inc., a subsidiary company of Amazon Inc. is also known for web monitoring that accounts for traffic solely based on users that have the Alexa Toolbar product installed. Will this new initiative by Nielsen pressure Alexa to tweak their tweaking technologies as well? I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.

References:
[1] nielsen-netratings.com
[2] Alexa: About the Alexa Traffic Rankings
[3] Associated Press: Nielsen scraps Web page view rankings (via Yahoo! News)

Alexa suing Statsaholic isn’t the only recent Alexa-related news to report today. The company announced a couple days ago that their widgets are more configurable.

Geoffrey Mack wrote that some of the newest features include:
- Compare up to 3 sites at a time
- Select from 3 different graph types, Reach Rank, or Pageviews
- Graph sizes are fully configurable, up to 400 W x 300 H
- Graph Ranges are configurable from 1 day to over 5 years
- Background color is configurable.

Every widget will come with a small advertisement powered by BritePic. The blog post by Mack also warns that if you are using Alexa Traffic Graphs without undocumented APIs, then it will be closed within weeks.

The widgets are available at http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup. I tried embedding the widget but it seems that it is having a hard time being compatible with Wordpress, my blogging tool.

I was recently contacted by Gary Roberts, a 21 year old software engineer from New Zealand who created Tall Street with Robert Mena.  Tall Street is a ‘Social Recommendation Engine’ where users vote for websites based on several categories.

The categories are: Web, Video, Music, Image, Book, News, Blog, Group, Shopping, Software, and Podcast.  Any visitors can vote for websites, even if they reload the website without even needing to register.

If you do create an account, you are allotted 50 cents in your account.  With that 50 cents, you can invest into any website.  Users can add a link, invest in other websites, and maintain investments within a portfolio:

This idea reminds me of another company that I had reviewed before:

Alexa Street was offline for quite some time, but resurfaced recently.  The advantage that Alexa Street has over Tall Street it is designed better to simulate stock trading where share value emulates change in Alexa rankings.  Tall Street allows anyone to vote for a site.  The advantage that Tall Street has is that it is not dependent on a third party to run.  Statsaholic (the website formely known as Alexaholic) ran into several problems because of that.

Two days ago, I wrote about how Amazon/Alexa is blocking Statsaholic from using their API.  Today I’ll report the other side of the story: Alexa’s side.

Alexa says that using the name Alexa is not tolerable in any circumstances, so it had a problem with the name Alexaholic.  “We reached out to Mr. Hornbaker [founder of Alexaholic] last year in an attempt to resolve the problem amicably. We even explored an acquisition, which we didn’t have to do,” writes Geoffrey Mack, an Alexa representative on his blog.  “Unfortunately, it became clear over time that Mr. Hornbaker did not want to stop trading off the Alexa name. This left Alexa with no alternative but to bring legal action to recover the misappropriated name.”

Hornbaker then was legally forced to change the name Alexaholic.  Hornbaker chose the name Statsaholic, but was still using the Alexaholic domain to transfer traffic to Statsaholic.  Mack also wrote “Mr. Hornbaker is in fact not using our web service to generate the traffic graphs on his website. Instead of obtaining the traffic data for a fee using the API which Alexa offers, he has chosen to pirate proprietary Alexa data by taking Alexa traffic graphs without permission.  Mr. Hornbaker is now trying to extract more value from Alexa by turning this into a PR issue, which he admits is a deliberate strategy.”

Alexa stated that they will be pursuing this issue aggressively and make sure that they are compensated for any losses.  In this case, I’d say that Alexa has a stronger argument especially because of the piracy involved.

I first wrote about Alexaholic on October 7, 2007, before Alexa revamped its website to run faster and provide more traffic comparison options.  It looks like that on March 18, Alexa took legal action against Ron Hornbaker about use of the name, Alexaholic.  So the website came back online as the name, Statsaholic.  Now it appears that Alexa is blocking the Statsaholic’s use of the API altogether.

“While blocking the hotlinking of their images is certainly within their right, in this case they are selectively blocking just this website, because tens of thousands of other websites, and Alexa’s own free widgets, hotlink their traffic graphs in exactly the same manner as I’m doing. Just so Alexa knows, I would gladly pay a reasonable fee to serve their graph images here, but to date they have no official api for those images,” wrote Hornbaker on the Statsaholic pages.  Hornbaker is currently looking to ways to keep the website up around the system, but is having a hard time getting around the API.

Before Alexa had blocked Statsaholic from using the API, visitors of the Statsaholic could embed graphs with Alexa data on their own websites.  I don’t believe that this feature has yet been introduced by Alexa yet, so the company may have felt threatened that Statsaholic was using their data without receiving any compensation.  However, looking at the previous statement by Hornbaker, it seems that he is prepared to offer some sort of compensation for continuous use of the data.  Whether it will pan out or not is still a mystery, but we’re rooting for Hornbaker as I see Statsaholic being a website that utilizes the API quite well.

Another questionable website that went down which I covered before that had the name Alexa in it was Alexa Street which also utilized the Alexa API.  Alexa Street was a game where you can buy and sell “shares” of website rankings based on Alexa data.  If a website’s Alexa ranking dropped, but was expected to rise shortly after, you clearly wanted to buy those shares and sell them again when it reaches the high point.  I am not sure whether Alexa took legal action against Alexa Street though.

If you look at Alexa’s current Movers & Shakers for this week, it appears that Alexaholic is one of the Movers & Shakers that dropped in rankings the most.  I think that this should be removed seeing as how Alexa is responsible for the drop.

I do not like MySpace compared to other social networks which is why I am glad to report that Alexa has confirmed that YouTube has a bigger rank and daily reach count than MySpace. This will probably irritate News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch even more since he has reportedly accused YouTube’s growth relying heavily on MySpace.

Google has a piece of the pie from both YouTube and MySpace. Google paid $900 million to power MySpace search. And YouTube Inc. became property of Google Inc. for $1.6 billion this past year.

[Source: Smaran Dayal]

I believe that as websites that were created to improve the Alexa.com service were introduced such as Alexaholic.com, Alexa realized that they had to stay ahead with the times and has totally revamped their chart system so that you can now compare 5 websites at a time, compare rank and page views and reach without having to leave the current page, and now the charts on Alexa.com are AJAX-driven. Here is a screenshot:

Here is a comparison between TechCrunch and SantaBanta, two websites with a close ranking. For all the comparison and settings that you initiate, Permalinks are created. So for example, I’m comparing the Rank, set the image as Large, kept the default smoothing at Level 3, and have the range set at 6 months and here is the Permalink for those settings.

On the Alexa homepage, there is a module called Web Discovery which links to the Blogger account of the Alexa team. The latest post was by Geoffrey Mack stated:
“I was just playing with some of the new ajaxy buttons and sliders our traffic graphs and ran across something that raised an eyebrow. Check out this YouTube graph…”

“It started going flat on October 9th. Anybody care to guess what happened on that date?” stated Mack.

Given that Geoffrey Mack was able to compare the drop in Reach with the Google/YouTube acquisition announcement, I think a great addition to Alexa’s charts would be if they could somehow associate the spikes and drops with news associated with their top 100,000 websites similar to Google Finance:

Notice how I selected A in the chart and it correlates with the news article to the right of the above screenshot. That would be phenomenal if Alexa could pull-off a similar feature so top 100,000 website owners could see what to improve on.