New Site Widgets

Today we released a new version of our Site Widgets. What's a Site Widget? I'm glad you asked... A Site Widget is a small piece of javascript that allows you to easily post Alexa data to any page. To get your own Site Widget go fill out this form, collect the code and insert it into your html.

For your entertainment, here are some sample Site Info Widgets.


And here is a sample Traffic Graph Widget.

...a picture is worth a thousand scribbles.

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Content as Democracy

It has been said: "Content is King." Back in 1996, that was the title of an essay -- by none other than Bill Gates -- that anticipates a decade's worth of changes in the way we use the Internet. These days, it's probably more accurate to say that content is a democracy: you can see it in sites like Wikipedia, which gives users the power to change content; and del.icio.us, which aggregates user trends. It's the same reason that -- a decade ago -- Alexa began compiling traffic stats. Popularity is queen, and she wants to be heard!

One of the sweeping changes that appears to be taking place today is a switch from editorial content to user-submitted, user-rated content. It turns out that in many cases, a group of users knows what they want better than the royals of yesteryear.

Ebaum's World
vs.

Albino Blacksheep

Something Awful

Newgrounds

Wired Magazine is running a story that mentions the on-going feud between several sites that are a great case in point. While these sites bicker over who stole whose traffic, they miss the bigger lesson -- that they are all losing to a new breed of site.

The graphs on the right are "reach" data collected by Alexa over the last year. The red dot is today and the gray bar is the standard deviation, which is where you expect most of the data points to fall. Each graph has its own scale and shows a site's trend relative to itself.

You can see that about six months ago, Ebaum's World and Albino Blacksheep started losing daily reach and Something Awful gained a small amount of reach. Both Something Awful and Newgrounds are within their standard deviation, indicating that they have fairly stable traffic bases. Something Awful did have a jump, which I suspect is due to a small portion of Ebaum's users trading horses. But that doesn't explain the general trend.

So I guess the question becomes: what happened the traffic early last year?

YouTube

Metacafe

The answer: The rise of user-submitted, user-rated media. These are represented by a new breed of sites like youtube and metacafe that completely bypass the cloistered editorial process in favor of open consumer-based systems.

You can see, for example, that YouTube and metacafe really started to take off at the beginning of this year. While metacafe seems to have stabilized, YouTube continues to gain reach. These graphs sharply contrast the others.

So what's the moral of the story? Users know what they like: let them tell you!

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Alexa Toolbar Update Released Today

Alexa's popularity has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last several years and none of it would be possible without the Alexa Toolbar. Good reasons to install the Alexa Toolbar:

1. The toolbar provides quick and easy access to the data that you expect from Alexa, including rankings, related links and more.
   
2. You can help improve the data by installing the toolbar. The more people use it, the better it gets.
3. Alexa is free.

Alexa is a community of users improving the Web for everybody. Just by using the Alexa Toolbar you are ensuring that everybody has access to a free and impartial source of traffic information. If you don't have the toolbar already, what are you waiting for?

The new toolbar, version 7.1, is a minor revision that includes some design improvements as well as one nifty new feature... it automatically shows a red or green arrow indicating whether the site's traffic rank is improving or declining.

For those of you that already have an Alexa Toolbar installed, thank you. Your Alexa Toolbar should auto-update within the next week or so. If you can't wait, feel free install it now.

Oh, and for those of you on FireFox, we still recommend the Search Status Toolbar.

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