When you look at the graph of our Movers and Shakers, the most striking increase among the top three is from the Mover in the number-two position, NoScript. This Firefox add-on is already popular; it has a three-month Traffic Rank of 3,799.
While the recent release of a new version of NoScript has certainly given the site's traffic a boost, it's already popular enough overall so the boost is not surprising or unprecedented. Even though it's the most vertical line on the Movers graph of the top three, it still comes in second to the top Mover, CLOT. This site doesn't usually get nearly as much traffic as NoScript, but suddenly had a huge increase in traffic, which makes the spike more significant.
There's a reason for the spike in traffic to CLOT: Scandal. CLOT is the website of an "urban lifestyle" company owned by Hong Kong movie star Edison Chen. Some illicit photos allegedly depicting Chen and various Hong Kong starlets surfaced recently, and Chen's side of the story is on his blog, hosted on the CLOT website. Suddenly, CLOT's Traffic Rank jumped from around 27,000 into the four thousands.
The third most significant Mover is Hampton Roads, the site of a Virginia news organization. Most of the increase in Alexa traffic for that site has been about another scandal: Virginia Beach police seized a large photograph from an Abercrombie and Fitch store because it was deemed obscene. Scandal equals traffic.
Of the ten Movers currently on our website, three are popular because of the Super Bowl. Two are popular because they deal with the Web and computers. The other five are the two scandal-related sites discussed above and three other celebrity gossip sites owing their increased Reach to Britney Spears and the Chen controversy. Oscar Wilde once remarked, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." If you're looking for a spike in Internet traffic, this is the case.
5 comments:
I always find the movers and shakers interesting for research purposes.
I still think it would be great to access a DAILY movers and shakers list of the global (and perhaps country specific) via the top sites API...I'd be happy to beta test it ;-) Rather than having to download massive global lists then sorting the data by gainers/losers myself. But I guess AWS makes more money that way.
Kinda like what these guys are doing: http://www.atopsites.com and http://hitgeist.com
Does Alexa read these comments I wonder?
Well, people loves scandals, you know. Just take a looka at tv shows (in Italy the Big Brother peaks everytime there is some "pulp" discusccion or scandal as well), and even if you have no images or vides to show, it works. For our second life related site http://www.slnn.it for instance we saw some picks everytime we upload articles which received some very "biased" comments... that started the fight. The scandals pay always.. (what a pity, isn't?)
Yes, everybody likes a scandal, but wheres the best place to start the word?
Well, as with the press, even on the web there are some gossip sites who are well known for their ability to find scandals. In the US there is for instance Drudgereport.com, in Italy Dagospia.com. For the metaverses like Second Life quite every blog-magazine try to follow every new scandals arise. For us on http://www.slnn.it I found the most interesting section is that about the fashion. Everytime is the same: you can describe absolutely "not biased" the event, be sure that after the results there will be a pick of angry comments from everyone... and quite everytime we see our hits multiply 3x or 4x (which isn't that bad).
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