New Top Sites Lists Have Exclusive Data Points

Update: This post refers to Top Sites lists we are no longer selling. You can now download a CSV file of the top million sites ranked by Alexa for free.

If you use Alexa's traffic data to make business decisions, you're going to love this.

Now, for the first time, we are making data available in our downloadable Top Sites Lists that does not appear anywhere on Alexa.com. In response to your requests, our Top Sites Lists include Unique Monthly User estimates and Monthly Pageview estimates. How do you compare with your competitors? Which acquisition proposition will bring the most eyeballs your way? With our new lists, the answer is one CSV file away.

While Alexa's website provides Traffic Rank data for all sites on the web, many of our customers asked for estimates of unique users and pageviews. Well, here you are. We still have the Global Top 500 and Top 100 by Language or Country accessible for free on our site. But if you want some solid estimates of visitors and pageviews, you can buy global lists of up to the Top 100,000 sites with data available only in those lists, and nowhere else on Alexa.com.

And we didn't even raise the price.

So, whether you're scoping out ad buys or looking for prospective clients; whether you are considering acquisitions or weighing partnerships, you can now base your digital decisions on additional data points with our new, improved Top Sites Lists.

Election Year Scandals for Traffic

I have recently been interested in the way smaller sites with which I was not previously familiar hit my radar as I observe traffic surging to them for one particular article relating to some scandal or other in the presidential election. Whether it's a confession, a funny image, or a fake interview, one well placed election-related item can put a site on the map.

Such was the case, for example, when Christopher Buckley, the son of the late uber-conservative William F. Buckley, posted a column on The Daily Beast announcing his intention to vote for Barack Obama, the Democrat. As he explained, he chose The Daily Beast because he thought it would be safer than his regular gig at the National Review Online--he was certain he'd receive tons of hate mail if he posted it there. Well, it did result in the National Review dropping his column. But it also resulted in many people visiting, for the first time, The Daily Beast. Scoop!

Another recent site that came to my attention while I was chasing traffic spikes was Street Prophets, a relatively small blog (and part of the Daily Kos community) on politics and faith. What appeared to drive the increase in traffic to the site was an image that alleged of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, "Finally, a beauty queen who doesn't want world peace."

Similarly, I had not personally been aware of the news blog African Press International, which saw a jump in traffic after publishing an allegedly fake interview with Michelle Obama.


I suppose my all-time favorite spike in traffic related to an election-year scoop of sorts was that in early August to the website Funny or Die. While the site frequently has a viral hit, the surge to a scripted announcement by Paris Hilton of her own political aspirations in response to John McCain's ad about Barack Obama's celebrity. Putting that one on the graph makes the others seem like mere blips.

About That Bailout

In the past few weeks, all the talk of the Wall Street bailou--ahem: Rescue Plan--had me wondering where people might be going on the web in order to follow the issue. While there would potentially be a flurry of activity to various banks for statements about the crisis, I was curious about any sort of sites that might have been pro- or anti-bailout. Then I saw this article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

You might say there were some folks who visited No Wall Street Bailout and Stop the Housing Bailout during the time when the bills were under consideration. So many that they shot up into short periods of ranking in the top sixty thousand or even near the top twenty thousand sites worldwide.

As an aside, I'd like to share a resource I found helpful when trying to wrap my brain around the bailout and preceding mortgage crisis. National Public Radio's This American Life ran a story in May called "The Giant Pool of Money." It explains the fairly complicated matters in plain language, and was so helpful to so many as to have been the focus of an article in The New York Times. Among the careful walk-through of the crisis with financial experts, the program has interviews with some of the people who were raking in money hand over fist by pushing bad dangerous mortgages on Americans. The program just aired a follow-up that's similarly lucid, only this one's on the bailout: "Another Frightening Show About the Economy."

Have you found resources online or offline that were helpful as you attempted to understand the recent economic stories? Feel free to enlighten us in the comments.