Alexa Blog

Alexa in Chinese continues to grow

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:00:00 +0000

The amount of positive feedback we've received about the Chinese version of the Alexa website has been amazing, sometimes even humbling. We have been listening to what you have to say, and are working hard to add new features to the cn.alexa.com to make it as useful as possible. For example, today we released a new "Top Sites" tab to cn.alexa.com, which includes the following sections.

Top Sites on the web
Top Chinese Language Sites
Top Sites by country
Top Sites by category

Just like in the Site Info pages, the website descriptions are given in Chinese when available. Also, while the Top Sites by Category defaults to "Top > World > Chinese Simplified", the entire directory of categories is available.

To make it easier for you to give us feedback, we've also added a place on the cn.alexa.com front page where you can email us your suggestions, either in English or Chinese. Have an idea of what we can do to make Alexa better? Let us know!

自从Alexa中文官方网站开设以来，我们得到众多振奋人心的反馈。对此，我们深受鼓舞，同时也深表感激。我们一直在认真听取您的意见，加紧为cn.alexa.com添加新的功能，使它能更好地为您服务。例如，今天我们在cn.alexa.com上发布了新的“顶级网站”标签，它包括以下内容

全球顶级网站
中文顶级网站
按国家/地区排名的顶级网站
按类别排名的顶级网站

在添加新功能的同时，我们也非常注重网页内容的中文化。例如在网站信息页面中，我们尽量采用中文的网站描述。同样，按类别排名的顶级网站模块的默认类别是简体中文“Top > World > Chinese Simplified”。我们也同时提供完整的类别目录。

为了让您更方便和我们联系，我们在cn.alexa.com主页上开通了用户反馈功能。您可以将您的中文或英文的意见和建议Email给我们。如果您有任何关于建设和提高Alexa 中文官方网站的想法，请让我们了解!

Webmasters, Own Your Site!

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:00:00 +0000

The Alexa help forums have been great for letting webmasters provide us with ideas for new services, as well as ways to improve existing ones. One such user-driven improvement is in the way webmasters interact with their Alexa data, including easy to use tools for editing your site's contact information and the ability for webmasters to respond directly to reviews of their site. In addition to being an engineer at Alexa I am also the webmaster of a small, personal site, and now like webmasters everywhere I can now take control of my site's information on Alexa and "Own My Site."

Edit Your Site Data

Editing the contact information for your site on Alexa has never been easier. Either starting from the "Contact Info" tab on your site's Site Information page, or on the "For Site Owners" tab near the top of the page, select the Self-service tools. You will be prompted to log, and you can use either an Alexa or your Facebook account. There is no advantage to having one type of account over another, use whichever is more convenient.

Once you have chosen the site you want to edit, you will need to verify that you are authorized to do so. You can become authorized either by adding a file to the root directory of your site, or adding a meta tag to your homepage. The methods work equally well, the former is a good choice if you have direct access to your web hosting, the latter if you do not. Once verified, editing your information is a simple as filling out and submitting a form. Easy! Your changes will appear on the Alexa website within 48 hours.

But what if takes divine intervention to get your company's homepage edited? Or what if you no longer own a website, and you want to remove your contact information completely? These situations do come up, so we offer a "manual verification" process to have an Alexa content editor change your information for you. As you might imagine this process is slow, up to 2 weeks, and you will have to go through the process again if you want to make more changes. So we highly recommend you use the automated system.

Respond to Reviews

Once you verify that you are authorized to edit a site, you will also be able to respond to reviews people have written about it. If you are logged in, any review for a site for which you are authorized will give you the option to "respond." You can respond once to each review, and responses fall under the same review guidelines the reviews themselves. Responses to reviews are attributed to the site, not your login, so your personal information remains that way. If you think a review was unfair, or want to clarify something, or even just want to thank the reviewer, you now can.

The Future

These are just a few of the improvements we have planned to allow you to own your content on Alexa. If you have ideas that you would like to share, please visit our help forums and share! We're listening.

Alexa, Now in Chinese

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:03:00 +0000

To better serve our Chinese users, today we are releasing a beta Chinese language version of the Alexa website, cn.alexa.com. You can browse the traffic stats, contact information, related links, clickstream data, and demographics of websites you are interested in, all in Chinese. At the moment only the 'Site Info' pages are available, but we will be rolling out more features soon. And if you have any ideas on how we can make the Chinese version of our website better, stop by our help forums and let us know.

In toolbar reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:00:00 +0000

Since adding the ability to review websites back to Alexa.com, the response has been phenomenal. Reviews are a great way to share your experiences with a site, both good and bad, with others across the web. Now, with the latest release of the Alexa Toolbar, you can do in-toolbar reviews of websites.

Previously with the toolbar, if you decided you wanted to review a website from the toolbar, you clicked the five stars rating button. The button would send you to the Alexa website, where you could read the reviews people have written as well as write one of your own. This works fine, but what if you want to write a review without leaving the site you are on? Well, now you can do that too.

In the current version of the toolbar you will see a little clipboard icon next to the five star rating button. If you click the clipboard and are logged in, either with an Alexa account or through Facebook Connect, a window will appear and you will be able to write a review right there. If you are not logged in, or need to register for an account, then you will be prompted to do so before being able to write a review. The Alexa Toolbar makes reviewing websites all that much easier.

It's good to share

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:00:00 +0000

As the father of a toddler, I'm constantly reminding my little one how important it is to share. For good reason, too, sharing is a good thing. That's why we've made it easy to share Alexa Traffic Details with your friends, family, and the world. In the lower right hand corner of each Traffic Stats graph there are the words "Share this:" followed by two little icons (see the included image). The first icon allows you to share the page with your friends on Facebook, while the other to tweets it to your followers on Twitter. Sharing is good, and now sharing Alexa Traffic Details is easy, too.

Easier to find international rankings.

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:00:00 +0000

The ease with which you can find how websites are ranked by country has just gotten easier.

Let's first take a step back, though. Did you know that in addition to the global Alexa Traffic Rank, we rank websites by country as well? Okay, you probably did. The Top Sites by Country lists have been available for quite some time, and the Alexa Traffic Detail pages display the Alexa Traffic Rank broken down by country. For example, Google currently has a global Alexa Traffic Rank of #1, but is ranked #3 in Turkey and #11 in Japan. The Alexa Traffic Detail pages also give estimates for how the users of websites are distributed by country. In the example of Google, not quite 40% of people who visit Google are in the US, while almost 10% are in India, etc.

If you click around and look at the Traffic Detail pages for various website and pay attention to the distributions of users by country, it should come as little or no surprise just how international many sites are. After all, there are people all over the world surfing the web, right now. At Alexa we realize that that webmasters in countries like China, Turkey, and Germany, for example, might not care how well their website is doing in the USA or even globally, and we try to support all webmasters and enthusiasts regardless of where they are located or where their visitors are from.

To help make it easier to quickly tell which country a site is most popular in, we have added the traffic rank in the country where the site has the most visitors to the top of the Traffic Detail pages, next to the global Alexa Traffic Rank. For example, Google has an Alexa Traffic Rank of #1 and a Traffic Rank in US of #1. On the other hand, the popular Chinese search engine Baidu (shown in the graphics) has a global Alexa Traffic Rank of #9, but is the #1 site in China. This data isn't new, of course. As discussed above it has been available on the Traffic Detail pages for some time. What is new is a quick and easy to to see how a site is ranked globally as well as in the country where most of its users are.

Alexa 101: The Anatomy of the Traffic Rank Graph

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:00:00 +0000

This is the first in a series of blog postings dissecting the Alexa site information pages. In this posting we take a detailed look at the "Traffic Stats" tab in the center of the page. This is a great place to start when trying to understand the traffic visiting a website, how that traffic is trending over time, and how it compares with competing sites. You can follow along by visiting the site info page for your favorite site, for example #1-ranked Google

The Alexa traffic rank is calculated using a combination of average daily reach and pageviews. What is "reach"? We'll have more to say about this in an upcoming post, but basically it measures how many people are visiting a site, expressed as a fraction of the global Internet population. For example, if you click on the "Reach" link below the "Traffic Stats" tab, you can see that Google's reach is currently around 33%, meaning that about one in three Internet users visit google.com on a typical day.

As the site with the highest combination of reach and pageviews, Google is currently ranked #1. The site with the second highest combination is #2, the next is #3, and so on. The best way to improve your Alexa traffic rank, that is to get a rank that is a smaller number than you have now, is to attract more visitors to your site and keep them engaged (and clicking) on more pages. Note that reach is weighted more heavily than pageviews in the combination, so other things being equal, the former (adding visitors) counts for more than the latter (adding pageviews per user).

The main Alexa traffic rank (as displayed in the Alexa toolbar) is a three-month rolling average, while the points in the Traffic Stats rank graph are daily. While the daily Alexa Traffic Ranks allow you to see fluctuations in a site's traffic on a very short timescale, the longer-term averages listed on the site information pages (and used for our Top Sites lists) are much more robust and authoritative for sites with low traffic. Note that ranks above about 100,000 should be taken with a healthy grain of salt and are not displayed on our graphs.

When looking at a Traffic Rank graph, what are some if the things you see? For some sites the first thing you might notice is an approximate 7-day periodicity in the data. This is because the "weekend web" is a little different than the weekday web, and some sites are less popular (or more popular) destinations on the weekend. You can clearly see this effect in the traffic graph for LinkedIn, the popular networking site for professionals.

Another feature you can see in traffic rank graphs is how a website's rank is trending over time. The three-month average is just that, a rank based on the accumulated reach and pageviews over the course of three months. Facebook, for example, recently moved ahead of YouTube and into the number three position. But this reversal happened a while ago in both the daily traffic rank estimates and in the one-month traffic rank. We can also see that Facebook is continuing to grow, and it could soon overtake #2 Yahoo (which until 2009 had long been #1).

What is all this good for? Well, at some level it is fun and interesting. The fact that Facebook is on any given day globally the 3rd most popular destination in the world says a lot about what people are using the web for. This pattern is not limited to just Facebook, either, but other community sites such as Wikipedia, Blogger, and Twitter, all all trending upward as well. People are using the web to connect with each other, and while this is not a new revelation it certainly is apparent in the data.

This analysis doesn't have to be limited to social networks or top sites, either. If you own a website, you can use Traffic Rank to compare your site to those of your competitors. Does the competition have a better (lower) rank than you? If so, you can start asking yourself why they are getting more visitors and/or pageviews, and what you can do to improve your rank in relation to theirs. Be careful, though. Even if your Alexa Traffic Rank is better than your competitors, that does not necessarily mean you are getting more of the quality traffic you want. For that you need to delve further into the Traffic Stats graph, which we will do in the next installment of this series.

The new and improved Alexa Toolbar

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:19:00 +0000

Not that long ago we released version 9 of the Alexa toolbar, which had a number of cool new features. But like most things there was room for improvement, and we were lucky enough to get some very constructive feedback on how to make the toolbar better. We listened, and today I am happy to announce a new version of the Alexa toolbar that incorporates many of those suggestions.

Highlights of the improvements include

the toolbar no longer opens links in new windows
the toolbar highlights fresher information in the form of Hot Pages and Hot Topic
the visual footprint is reduced
improved performance and stability

One of the biggest changes visually is the toolbar now features the Alexa Hot Pages and Alexa Hot Topics. Clicking on either icon will take you to Alexa's What's Hot page, where you get a real time view into what is popular on the web right now. You can get lists of hot pages and hot topics by clicking the small arrows next to the respective icons, or go directly to the top page or topics by clicking on their names.

Other features of the toolbar remain in icon form. For whatever site you are on you can visit the Alexa site information page for it, see its rank and related links, visit it in the past using the Wayback Machine, or write a review.

If you are a toolbar user and want to upgrade, or if you are interested in checking it out, all you need to do is visit the Alexa toolbar download page and follow the instructions there. Sorry, the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer at the moment. If you are a Firefox user then you should check out Sparky, the Alexa Firefox addon.

And if you want your input to be part of the next toolbar release, then visit our Alexa toolbar help forums and let us know what you think.

What's Hot?

noreply@blogger.com (Wayne Coburn) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:17:00 +0000

Do you enjoy keeping up with what's hot on the web right now? Then you really need to check out the new What's Hot feature at Alexa.

What's Hot improves upon our existing Hot URLs. Now you can not only see, in real time, which pages on the Internet are the most popular, but also what topics people are interested in. Right now I am seeing kate gosselin, ted kennedy, and michael jackson (among others), although the list will obviously be different when you look because it is updated every 5 minutes.

Knowing what topics are popular is good, of course, and knowing what they are in real time is better. But there are plenty of other places on the web to see lists of what people are currently buzzing about. The question is, what if I want to know why something is popular as well? Well, if you click on a Hot Topic, we'll send you to a list of pages that people are visiting right now to make that topic hot. Instead of scratching your head and wondering what a popular word or phrase means, you can dive straight into the action.

We also still have the Alexa Hot URLs, although they have been renamed "Hot Pages." We renamed them because we wanted to emphasize that it's the content, not the URL, that is popular. As always, the Alexa Hot Pages let you know what is popular and interesting on the web right now.

Your Customers are Talking. Are You Listening? Alexa Website Reviews are Back.

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:51:00 +0000

In business, reputation is a currency that is not easily accumulated, and easily lost. It can make or break a business. Online, this is more true than ever, with social media acting as an amplifier you can quickly find your brand in the midst of a public relations nightmare. Anger the wrong customer, or ignore too many customer complaints and you may learn this lesson the hard way.

United Airlines learned this lesson when they failed to settle a claim for a guitar reportedly damaged by baggage handlers. Unfortunately for United, the customer was a talented musician with a flair for social media. He wrote a song, United Breaks Guitars, and posted it on YouTube. After just two weeks the video has been viewed over 2 million times. Similarly, Urban Outfitters has been on the receiving end of a viral complaint of stealing other people's designs. When the complaints went unheeded the complainers went public with Urban Counterfitters.com

Smart businesses know that they need to manage their PR and often have a person dedicated to responding to blog posts, and posting in forums to participate, spin, and hopefully mitigate any damage that can be done by negative online posts. They also know that customer service is an increasingly important front in the Public Relations battleground. Any customer can potentially take a complaint viral.

But social media is by no means a bad deal for all brands. Many companies have benefited from socially engaged customers who rave about their products online. Keep your customers delighted and you could benefit from the best kind of PR: free unsolicited customer reviews.

All of this is a round-about way to get to the point of this blog post, Alexa's Reviews. Many of you may remember a few years ago when Alexa had a vast database of website reviews... tens of thousands of reviews for thousands of different websites large and small. Alexa was a clearinghouse of sorts for customer rants and raves and was the destination of choice for Web surfers who wanted to express an opinion about an online brand. Sadly, for technical reasons the reviews were taken offline. But today I am thrilled to announce that they are back.

So what's new? First and foremost, all of the previous reviews are available on Alexa again. Take a look here at the reviews for ign.com. Secondly, you can now create accounts and log in to Alexa with an Alexa login or a Facebook login. Your reviews will all be aggregated under you account and you can click on the names of reviewers to see other reviews that they have written.

For companies large and small, Alexa is once again a necessary stop for all smart brands that know how to manage their online reputation. Whether you run a personal blog or you run a major online operation, Alexa can give you some insight into what your customers are saying about you after they hang up the phone. Are your customers acting as ambassadors of your brand or critics? The answer to that question can make all the difference between success and failure.

Are you listening?

How To Increase The Traffic To Your Website

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:44:00 +0000

I get asked this all the time, whether via Alexa's forums, or after work by my friends: How do I get more traffic to my Web site? I wish there was just some simple button that I could tell people to push and that it would solve all their traffic issues. But it doesn't exist; if it did, everybody would already be using it.

But there are whole heaps of great advice, which if followed, will lead to more visitors to your site. What follows is a simple to follow list of best practices to help get you on your way.

1. On-Site Factors. Start with your site. You need to make it the best it can be. So that it will be attractive to visitors AND search engines.

Keywords. What is your site about? Find a few key words and phrases that you think describe your site and that people may actually enter into a search box on Google. If you pick very popular keywords and phrases, you might be disappointed. Millions of people will search for those keywords and phrases, but you will be way down the search results because lots of sites are optimized for those phrases. If you pick less popular keywords and phrases, you may have a shot of actually showing up in the search results because fewer sites have optimized for those keywords and phrases.

Optimize Your Site. Use your keywords and phrases on your site. Put them in the title of your page, in the H1 tags, metatags and throughout your site. Use them in the text of links that point to your page. Shoot for having keyword density of about 6%.

Have Good Content. You should strive to have something new on your site once per day. Don't let your site get stale... Google's algorithms will notice and so will visitors to your site. If you don't have a lot of time to create unique content every day, consider putting up a daily poll, creating a forum on your site, or leaving a comments field/Guest Book for visitors to fill out. If you use Twitter or Facebook, you can have your updates automatically appear on your site.

Unique Value Proposition. Give something away on your site to your visitors to remember you by. Otherwise people may forget your site and won't come back. You can find interesting content on widgetbox.com, or you can give them a custom Alexa Toolbar. Just give them something.

Create A Sitemap. Every time you update content on your site you should update your sitemap and submit the site map to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc.. There are lots of free sitemap tools out there. Find one and get started. It is a great way to let Google know when your site is updated.

Return Visitors. How are you going to get people to return to your site after they have left? You may want to consider an e-mail newsletter. But don't spam... please. If people like your content let them sign up to get your newsletter. You should also allow people to subscribe to your updates via facebook or twitter. Most blogs offer easy plugins for this feature.

Link Bait. People love lists. Make lists of things that are relevant to your site and put them on your site, like top ten fishing sites. Then let the sites in your list know you have made your list. They may take that list and put it on their site... Or give out awards like "fishing site of the week." which brings us to...

2. Off-Site Factors. Once you have a great site you need to start thinking about other factors, mostly links. If nobody links to your site you are going to have a tough time getting seen in Google's results. More links = better placement in Google. So how do you get links?

Link Number One. The first link is easy. Alexa already has a link to your site, and Alexa's page rank is high, so the link from Alexa counts more than most. You just need to let Google know that Alexa has a link to your site. How do you do that? Install the Google Toolbar then visit Alexa. But be sure to put your Alexa Toolbar back!

Get Listed In Directories. Directories that are relevant to your site are generally more important than others, so if your site is about basket weaving, find a basket weaving directory and ask them to list your site. Get listed in as many as possible. And then find other general directories like DMOZ and get listed there. Are there Wikipedia articles that should list your site as a place for more information on a topic? Get listed.

Participate In Social Media. Find forums that are relevant to your content and participate... a lot. Update your signature footer on the forum to include a link to your site. Use Twitter, Facebook, Digg, but, in all cases, do not just post or write about your own site. Nobody cares. Write and post about things that you care about, sometimes your site, and people who like your posts may make their way over to your site.

Have Something Newsworthy. If you have something newsworthy, don't just blog about it. First post it as a press release on your site, then update your sitemap, then post it to the newswires, then submit it to ezine articles, Article Base and/or Go Articles, then blog about it, twitter about it, etc. If you do it right you will have at least a couple of new links to your site, and if you do it really right you could have dozens of new links.

Advertise. There are lots of great advertising solutions out there. Google AdWords is a great place to start and, if done well, can offer you a good deal on targeted traffic. Display advertising can be effective and affordable as well. The social networks are now offering do-it-yourself advertising at reasonable prices, and even Alexa allows you to advertise at inexpensive CPMs.

And, as always, install the Alexa Toolbar. It won't increase the traffic to your site, but it won't hurt and you will be helping Alexa to track your site and helping the entire Internet Community by contributing to Alexa's Traffic Data.

Getting more traffic to your site is a journey. Take the first steps today, and with a little hard work and some luck, you will be counting your visitors in the millions before too long.

In Time for Summer, Top Travel Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:16:00 +0000

Every Summer people flock to the online travel sites to make their travel plans. This year, despite the flagging economy, is no different. Here is a round-up of the top travel sites. When you book your tickets, give one of these sites a try.

Amazon.com Widgets

Top Online Travel Sites
There are a lot of great travel sites out there and if I neglected to include yours, let me know in the comments. The list below is comprised of flight aggregators, where you can find flights from multiple airlines. Single airline sites like JetBlue or SouthWest are not included, nor are sites that are focused on hotels or reviews.

1. Expedia - www.expedia.com
The big grand-daddy of online travel aggregators is Expedia. With an Alexa Rank of 351 and climbing, Expedia is cruising through the downturn with ease. With services for flights, hotels and car rentals this one-stop shop should be on your list of sites to visit when booking tickets for your Summer travel.
Alexa Rank: 351

2. Trip Advisor - www.tripadvisor.com
Nipping at the heels of Expedia we have Trip Advisor with an Alexa Rank of 376. Historically Trip Advisor has been a site focused on travel reviews. But with the addition of flight and hotel booking, and more, Trip Advisor has grown into a serious Expedia competitor.
Alexa Rank: 376

3. Travelocity - www.travelocity.com
You may know travelocity from its garden gnome mascot, seen on many television commercials. Currently at number 3 on the list of top online travel sites with a rank of 682, Travelocity is not faring as well in the downturn with traffic to the site showing a slight downturn.
Alexa Rank: 682

4. Orbitz - www.orbitz.com
Another site that has done quite a bit on online advertising is Orbitz, whose commercials might be confused with Orbit gum, both of which use 50's stylizations and a blue color scheme. Orbitz at Alexa Rank of 693 is still one of the most popular online travel sites, but has seen some decline over the past two years. Like Expedia and Travelocity, Orbitz is a full-featured online travel aggregator.
Alexa Rank: 693

5. Priceline - www.priceline.com
Yet another site with funny television commercials is Priceline, whose commercials feature William Shatner egging people on to make low bids. Priceline is quite unlike the other travel aggregators and allows people to make offers/bids on travel packages which may or may not be accepted by the provider. As you can see from the graph, Priceline has been experiencing some significant growth over the past year, which is an impressive feat in this economy.
Alexa Rank: 782

6. Kayak - www.kayak.com
Kayak, while lesser known than many of the sites higher up in this list, has a loyal user base that continues to come back for the Kayak's innovative features such as price histories and advanced searching tools. While Kayak hasn't experienced much growth over the last 12 months, its two year growth has been impressive. This site is a must for folks who are comfortable with their advanced interface.
Alexa Rank: 915

7. Travelzoo - www.travelzoo.com
You may have noted that the other sites in this list show a fair amount of seasonal variation. Travelzoo, strangely, does not. Travelzoo has been around for ages and their site looks very much like it did in 1998. Despite their old-school design, it remains a popular destination.
Alexa Rank: 1,312

8. HotWire - www.hotwire.com
At number eight on our list we have HotWire with an Alexa rank of 1,519. Hotwire, which started with an odd business model, where you would book flights with vague flight times on unnamed airlines, is now very similar to the Expedia and Orbitz sites. While not as popular as the biggest players, Hotwire has been experiencing some growth over the last two years.
Alexa Rank: 1,519

9. CheapTickets - www.cheaptickets.com
The economic downturn has not been kind to cheaptickets, whose traffic is off by almost 50% over the last two years. But don't let that stop you from visiting the site, which has all the features that you would expect from a travel aggregator.
Alexa Rank: 2,014

10. CheapoAir - www.cheapoair.com
CheapOAir is a relative newcomer whose traffic has grown significantly over the last two years and is now running neck and neck with Cheap Tickets. No special features here to recommend cheapoair, but it does have all the features that you would expect, plus it has the word "cheap" in the name, which is bound to garner a few extra clicks.
Alexa Rank: 2,580

For more online travel sites give Alexa's Site Finder a try (Travel), or take a look at the Top Travel Sites in the Directory.

Facebook Juggernaut Overtakes YouTube

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:07:00 +0000

Observant tweeter nametrader noticed that Facebook has been continuing its rise up the rankings and has recently unseated YouTube to become the 3rd most popular site on the Web according to Alexa's Daily Rankings yesterday. Take a look at the graph below showing the daily reach for Facebook (in blue) and YouTube.

Next up for Facebook? Google and Yahoo:
I don't expect Facebook to pass Yahoo (in Red) any time soon, but if the current trend holds Facebook could pass Yahoo by March of next year and may actually catch Google six months after that.

Don't forget the Grads... Top Used Car Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:40:00 +0000

It is that time of year again, with Summer fast approaching, and students preparing for graduation. I know a little something about Alexa's readers, and you are a bit wealthier than most, so I'm assuming that you will all be buying cars for your graduates? Listed below are the top sites to help you begin your search for the perfect used car for your favorite graduate.

But first, a word from our sponsor, amazon.com:

Amazon.com Widgets

Top Used Car Sites

As with so many of these lists, sometimes we are comparing apples and oranges. For example, some of the sites below sell both used and new cars. Some of these license their data from other sources, and some sites are not included at all because they are not "sites" but simply sections of much larger sites, like autos.msn.com, for example (who just happen to source their data from the #1 site on our list, AutoTrader.)

1. AutoTrader - autotrader.com
Not only is AutoTrader the biggest online used car site, it is also used to power a number of the sites in this list.
Alexa Rank: 886

2. Edmunds.com - edmunds.com
Edmunds started off in 1995 as a vehicle research website and now has a healthy business helping to sell used cars, powered by AutoTrader.
Alexa Rank: 1,130

3. Cars.com - cars.com
The number three site in our list is Cars.com, started in 1998, and owned by a conglomerate of Newspaper/Media companies.
Alexa Rank: 1,592

4. CarMax - carmax.com
Carmax is an interesting hybrid of 100 real-world car lots spread across the United States and a large online website. The advantage is that all the cars undergo the same inspection process and are warrantied and have a 5 day money back refund policy.
Alexa Rank: 4,110

5. Carfax - carfax.com
Carfax is the service that people use to make sure that they aren't buying a car that was previously "totalled". They compile data from 20 different sources so that you can see your car's official history. They also have a thorough listing of used cars for sale.
Alexa Rank: 6,615

6. CarsDirect - carsdirect.com
Number 6 on our list is Los Angeles-based CarsDirect, first launched in 2001 as a service to connect you with dealers in your area. They have been selling used cars since 2002.
Alexa Rank: 6,904

7. Vehix.com - vehix.com
Vehix.com was launched in 1996 as a automotive research portal and now has an inventory of nearly 1 million vehicles listed. Vehix.com is also one of the only sites in our roundup to experience uninterrupted growth during the economic downturn, no doubt due to their continued television advertising.
Alexa Rank: 9,567

8. Carsoup - carsoup.com
These lists always contain at least one surprise for me, and CarSoup is it. I still don't know much about them (how about an "about us" link guys) but one look at their brightly colored site and you'll see that they definitely stand out from the crowd.
Alexa Rank: 30,383

9. AutoBytel - autobytel.com
AutoBytel claims to have been the first auto-buying site, launching in 1995, and are now a publicly traded company: Nasdaq- ABTL. The AutoBytel site is beginning to look a little old-school and they have allowed eight other online car sites pass them in the rankings.
Alexa Rank: 34,125

That's it for our list today. Don't forget your Grad!

Father's Day - Top Online Golf Stores

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:52:00 +0000

With Father's Day just around the corner (only 23 shopping days left!) I thought it would be helpful to put together a list of the Top Online Golf Stores (hint, hint, hint...). If you start shopping now you'll be able to get Dad that new driver (TaylorMade Burner) he's been talking about and you won't have to pay for expedited shipping.

But first, a word from our sponsor, amazon.com:

Amazon.com Widgets

Top Online Golf Stores

1. Golf Smith - golfsmith.com
Golf Smith, founded in 1967, has been around for quite some time, even before the age of the Internet. They have managed to parlay their offline success into an online success to become the number one online golf store.
Alexa Rank: 15,145

2. The Golf Warehouse - tgw.com
The Golf Warehouse is the only store in this roundup that I have used and I can say that they had what I wanted and the price was right. Can't beat that.
Alexa Rank: 18,720

3. Rock Bottom Golf - rockbottomgolf.com
Rock Bottom Golf started off as an E-Bay store and has since grown into the third largest online golf store. The site features an animated mascot, Scratch, a caveman with a bone through his nose that points you to the rock bottom deals.
Alexa Rank: 53,696

4. Golf Galaxy - golfgalaxy.com
Coming in right behind Rock Bottom Golf is Golf Galaxy. I was unfamiliar with Golf Galaxy prior to compiling this list, but it appears they have been online since 1997 and have been doing quite well both online and offline with 90 stores in 31 states.
Alexa Rank: 56,716

5. Golf Balls.com - golfballs.com
If you find it amazing that a site selling golf balls is the 5th most popular online golf store, you aren't alone. Originally started as an online-only store in 1995, selling used golf balls, golfballs.com has expanded to selling a wide variety of golf accessories with a specialty in custom imprinted golf balls.
Alexa Rank: 74,415

6. Edwin Watts Golf - edwinwattsgolf.com
Originally founded offline in 1968, Edwin Watts golf comes in at #6 in our roundup of the top online golf stores. With 71 stores in 10 states, EWG is a large retailer that has grown into a significant online presence.
Alexa Rank: 77,283

7. Global Golf - globalgolf.com
Global Golf is another E-bay success story. Originally opened in 2001, Global Golf has now outgrown it's origins on E-Bay and is large online retailer of used golf equipment (plus some new stuff as well.) Looking for an "almost new" driver. Global Golf has you covered.
Alexa Rank: 87,977

That's it for our list today. Don't forget your Dad! Oh, and in case you were wondering which top online golf store has the best price for that TaylorMade Burner driver, it is Rock Bottom Golf, here. ;-)

Bit.ly and Tinyurl.com - Followup

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:51:00 +0000

I just wanted to quickly follow up on my previous post about bit.ly and tinyurl.com on May 7. At the time of that post Tinyurl was the undisputed king of the hill of all the URL shorteners (sites that take your long URLs and make them short for convenient posting to blogs, facebook, twitter, etc..) I predicted that Twitter's switch from Tinyurl as the default URL shortener to Bit.ly was going to upset Tinyurl's leadership position. So how did I do?

Take a look at the Daily Pageviews graph below.

In just one short month Bit.ly has gone from having 1/3 of the pageviews of Tinyurl to having 30% more.

When it comes to pageviews, Bit.ly is now king of the hill.

When it comes to visitors, Tinyurl still wins, but not for long. Alexa's Daily Reach graph indicates a steady decline in Tinyurl visitors and a meteoric rise for Bit.ly. In just two more weeks Bit.ly will take over to become the undisputed king of the URL shortening hill.

I am not acquainted with the details of the deal between Twitter and Bit.ly, or the reasons behind the switch from Tinyurl, but I am certain of this. This seemingly minor change represents a big deal to both Tinyurl and Bit.ly.

New Help and Forums on Alexa

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:43:00 +0000

Today Alexa has released new community features in our help section. The goal is to provide an environment where community members can freely exchange thoughts, ideas, knowledge, and opinions. To get started, go to http://www.alexa.com/help. From there you can browse the forums, post new topics and reply to topics that have been posted by others. We will be checking in on the forums on a regular basis to pitch in answers and to hear what you have to say.

It is our hope that you find the new help and forums to be both easy to use and helpful to you as you make use of Alexa's products and services. We place tremendous value on this environment as a medium of information exchange and connection point for you, your peers, and the Alexa team.

Check it out now and let us know what you think.

Search Engine Optimization Companies

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:46:00 +0000

Alexa's CEO, Niall O'Driscoll, once said to me "If you want to know how good a search engine optimization company is, type 'search engine optimization' into Google and see who comes up first." The logic is infallible. The same logic applies to Dentists and Barbers... if you walk into a barbershop and the barber has awful hair, walk out.

So I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at three of the leading Search Engine Optimization sites out there, seochat.com, seobook.com and seomoz.org, and see what they do and how well they practice what they preach.

As a point of comparison, and to make sure this test is somewhat fair, each of the sites have similar traffic, with 3 month Alexa Ranks between 3500 and 2500, and daily visits between an average of 75K to 120K.

Test 1: Who ranks best for "search engine optimization"

Try it yourself. Search for "search engine optimization" on Google and see which of the three sites comes up first. Seochat comes up as the third result on the page, behind wikipedia and behind a Google article on search engine optimization. Seobook.com and seomoz.org are farther down the rankings. The graph below confirms it, seochat gets a much larger percent of their traffic from search engines than its competitors:

Surprisingly, to me anyway, seochat.com also wins this contest if you search for "seo".

Test 1 Winner: seochat.com

Test 2: Who has the most "high quality" links?
If you want traffic from Google you are going to have to work on more than your keywords. You are going to have to get a lot of high quality links pointing to your site. That, in short, is how Google will know whether your site is important or not, and it is how Google decides which site with the "right" keywords appears at the top of the results. So how did our sites do?

Let me give you a little help reading this graph. I have broken links into three types, ranging from most important (Links in Top 1,000) at the top, to least important (Links in Top 100,000) at the bottom. Starting at the top, you can see the seomoz.org wins the most links from sites that are in the Top 1,000. Seomoz.org also has the most links overall, giving it an important edge in search engine rankings.

Test 2 Winner: seomoz.org

Test 3: Which site has the most appeal?
Sometimes we can get so wrapped up talking about "keyword optimization" and "link building strategies" that we can forget about perhaps the most important factor of all. Appeal -- that certain "something" that keeps people on your page and keeps them coming back. How else are you going to get links to your site and get more traffic if your site lacks appeal?

But how do you measure appeal? I like to measure appeal with Bounce Rate (do people "bounce" away after visiting) and Time on Site. How did our sites do? Let's start with bounce rate:

With bounce rate a lower number is better, indicating that few people "bounce". It looks like all of these sites have a relatively high bounce rate, at 50% or above, with seobook.com with the largest bounce rate, at 70%. Before being too hard on seobook.com, their bounce rate is no doubt due to the "hard sell" interstitial sales technique that they use on their site. The first time I saw that form I was inclined to hit the back button, and if others do the same it will cause seobook.com's bounce rate to rise. But what is unknown to me, and perhaps more important than a good bounce rate, is how well seobook.com converts visitors to leads via this method.

One of the consequences of search engine optimization is that as you get really good at it your bounce rate is likely to go up. It might take a second for that to sink in. Your bounce rate will go up because you will be getting more and more traffic from search, and it will be less targeted traffic. All of these new visitors to your site are less likely to stick around and become customers.

Next up on our measure of appeal is Time on Site. How did our sites do?

With "Time on Site" you want to have a larger number, indicating that people are sticking around, making pageturns and hopefully becoming customers. What stands out here is that seobook.com has the lowest time on site, by a long shot. Again, this is likely due to their aggressive interstitial. The winner of the Time on Site category is seomoz.org with over 4.5 minutes on average.

Appeal is what I would call a leading indicator. If you score well in these areas you are likely to garner more links and have a shot at the top of the rankings. It is where people should start first when looking at their Internet Marketing efforts... building a site with content that people want to link to and come back to.

Test 3 winner: seomoz.org

Overall Winner
So who is the overall winner? The site with the most traffic wins, and that site is:

Surprise: seobook.com

Despite losing each of our three tests, seobook.com gets more traffic than seochat.com and seomoz.org. But how do they do it? Loyalty. Despite getting less traffic from search engines, and despite having fewer links than seomoz, and despite scaring away potential customers with aggressive marketing, seobook is doing quite well. They are converting visitors to customers, and turning those customers into regular visitors.

The take-away lesson is that good SEO is important, but it can't compete with a loyal and engaged user-base. Seobook.com is a perfect case in point.

Movie Websites: Good Predictor of Box Office

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:16:00 +0000

When I looked through the Alexa Movers and Shakers this morning I noticed that we had some movie websites in the list and it reminded me of a post I've been meaning to do for some time now, comparing traffic to the movie website to box office. I have speculated that traffic to a movie website will be a good predictor of its opening box office. Let's take a look.

Angels & Demons vs. Star Trek

For the purposes of this comparison I am going to look at peak traffic to the movie website(s) and at opening weekend box office.

Star Trek's opening weekend is the clear winner with almost 40% more box office. But is the same true if you look at peak traffic to the website?

Yes. Star Trek (startrekmovie.com) clearly received more daily peak pageviews than Angels & Demons (angelsanddemons.com). The peak day for traffic to movie sites is typically Friday of the opening weekend, as it was in both of these cases.

OK, that was fun, but let's take another recent set of movies and see if the theory holds up.

17 Again vs. Monsters vs. Aliens

Clear winner in box office dollars is Monsters vs. Aliens. What about the movie websites?

The theory holds up. If a movie website gets more traffic it is going to rake in more at the box office. I'll keep my eyes open for an exception to this rule. Night at the Museum is coming out this weekend and judging from its website traffic it will have a great opening weekend... you heard it here first.

Rich | Poor

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:41:00 +0000

I thought it would be interesting to look at two different types of sites today, ones that attract a wealthy audience, and ones that attract the poor.

$Rich

I picked 5 sites that have an audience heavily skewed toward the wealthy, including linkedin.com, wsj.com, expedia.com, yelp.com and cbssports.com. These sites appear to have nothing in common. But dig a little deeper and you see that they all attract a very wealthy audience, consisting largely of people making over $100K per year.

So how do they do it? How do these sites attract a wealthy audience. They each appeal to different aspects of a wealthy lifestyle. Linked in appeals to business people. Wall Street Journal appeals to people with investments. Expedia appeals to people who can afford to travel. Yelp appeals to people who eat out a lot. CBS Sports... well that one is a mystery to me.

Poor

Here we have five sites that are skewed toward people earning less than $30k per year, including mininova.org, onemanga.com, gamefaqs.com, y8.com and ultimate-guitar.com. You may not have heard of these sites before, but they are all very popular sites, each getting in excess of 3 million unique visitors per month. So why haven't you heard of them? I know a little something about Alexa's demographics and the reason you haven't heard of these sites is because you, a reader of the Alexa Blog, are unlikely to be under the age of 25 or earn less than $30k per year.

So what do these sites do that attracts the young and poor? Mininova is a "torrent" download site where people can go to find free downloads, mostly of movies. The mere mention of the word torrent sends the older and wealthy crowd running in the opposite direction. In contrast, Hulu, which is a free video site where people can watch TV shows and movies, appeals to the wealthy with its clean and simple interface and no mention of torrents. One Manga, the second site on our poor list is a Japanese comics site, which as you can imagine appeals to the younger crowd. Game FAQs is a community help site about video games. Y8 is a free online game site. Ultimate Guitar is a free sheet music site geared toward aspiring rock stars.

Advertisers are a pretty smart bunch and they know who it is they want to reach. You won't find any Lexus ads on the poor sites and conversely, you won't find any Taco Bell ads on the Rich sites. Each site's demographics determines who will want to advertise there. The question for you is what kind of site are you building and who will it attract? The answer to that question will ultimately decide who will be willing to advertise on your site and how much money you can potentially earn via advertising.

Battle of the URL Shorteners

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:53:00 +0000

In the social web it seems there is nothing quite as fun as sharing URLs. With the rise of sites like Twitter, which limits communications to only 140 characters, and the often long length of URLs, there is a new breed of sites coming online that shorten URLs into tiny snippets of their former selves.

Take this URL for example, on Yahoo! about the Manny Ramirez drug scandal: http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ys-ramirezsuspension050709&prov=yhoo&type=lgns. If you were to post that URL to Twitter, 85 or your 140 character limit would already be used up, leaving you just 55 characters to type in your witty comment.

Along come the URL shorteners. Go to Tinyurl.com, copy that 85 character long Yahoo! URL into the text box, click the "Make Tiny URL" button, and receive this alternative tiny URL, http://tinyurl.com/cmrt9s, just 25 characters in length. That leaves me with 120 characters for my witty remarks.

Tinyurl has been around the Web for a long time, well before twitter came along. It has been a simple and single-purpose website. But, now that Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and so many other social sites have reached the big time, something new is happening. The sharing of URLs has reached critical mass, and services like Tinyurl have an opportunity to grow into something altogether new.

The sharing of URLs online is no longer just random unimportant noise. It is news. It is a pulse, indicating what is happening in a society. Take Tweetmeme for example. They get it. They treat all URLs shared via Twitter as news, and sort the most popular shared URLs to the top. Go to Tweetmeme any time of day and you can see what the society thinks is important right now, at this particular moment. That is because what we share via Twitter, in aggregate, is news.

Does Tinyurl understand how sites like Twitter have changed what it means to be an URL shortener? Upstart URL shortener Bit.ly seems to get it. They understand that the act of sharing an URL is an explicit act indicating interest in an URL and that there is more to be done with that information. Here are some new features of Bit.ly that prove my point:

Bit.ly remembers the URLs I've shortened. When I go back to Bit.ly they are all there for me to peruse.
Clicking on "info" shows me stats for the shortened URL. How many times was it clicked? Where were people located geographically when they clicked my url? What services were people on when they on when they clicked my shortened url? Who else shortened that URL. And so much more.
Bit.ly submits all shortened urls to OpenCalais to be semantically classified, categorized and tagged.

There are a number of other URL shorteners out there with other interesting and sometimes even funny features (I'm talking about you, I CAN HAZ dot COM.) I mention Bit.ly and Tinyurl.com specifically because Twitter recently switched from using Tinyurl's URL shortening service to Bit.ly. Now, when you type a long URL into Twitter, it will automatically shorten that URL for you using Bit.ly.

Until now, Tinyurl has been the biggest of the URL shorteners by a comfortable margin. I suspect, with this recent change by Twitter, more people are going to see the advantages of Bit.ly and start switching over. It won't happen overnight, but having Twitter repeatedly show your URL to millions daily is bound to have an effect on users. Looking at the chart to the left you can see the relative size of the two services, Bit.ly and Tinyurl.com, measured in visitors, and the amount of overlap between the two. Two months from now I expect that green circle to be a lot larger.

Another less discussed effect of having Twitter default to Bit.ly as an URL shortener is the profound effect it will have on Bit.ly's search engine placement. Search engines always try to sort the important links to the top, and one of the most important measures of a site/link's importance is the number of links pointing to it (this is a somewhat simplified explanation, but mostly right.)

As you can see from the data below, Tinyurl.com has been benefiting from the Twitter relationship.

Number of sites linking to Tinyurl.com and Bit.ly that are in the Alexa Top 1000:

Tinyurl - 386
Bit.ly - 9

The net result of this difference in number of highly ranked links is that Tinyurl has been doing well in search engines, while Bit.ly has not. Tinyurl gets an estimated 530K visits via search per month, while Bit.ly gets approximately 56K.

Bit.ly will soon have tens of millions of links being pointed to it, all because somebody typed some link into Twitter, Twitter turned it into a Bit.ly URL, and somebody shared that shortened URL on a page, whether Twitter, Facebook, Digg, a personal blog or other. Soon, all the search engines will see Bit.ly as an important Web presence, causing it to get even more traffic from search. It is a virtuous circle and Bit.ly is the beneficiary.

It is still way to early to call a winner here, but the next six months will be an interesting time as these URL shorteners reinvent what it means to be an URL shortener, fight over market share, and come up with business models that allow them to sustain their business for the long haul.

Don't Forget Your Mom This Sunday...

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:52:00 +0000

We've done a few posts about the flower sites in the past, including "Mothers and Sweethearts" and "Which is More Popular: Mother's Day of Valentine's Day?"

If you take a look at the traffic to two of the major flower sites shown on the left you'll see that they get the majority of their traffic on two hallmark-made holidays, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

Taking a closer look at the graph above, there are some interesting things to note about the two sites, Proflowers.com and 1800flowers.com. Proflowers, shown in red above, has been trailing behind 1800flowers for years, consistently pulling between 50% and 75% as much traffic. But as of February this is no longer true. This Valentine's Day Proflowers saw an almost 60% increase in Year over Year traffic, besting 1800flowers by 40%.

Here's the kicker: Proflower's increase in traffic didn't come from search.

Take a look at the (messy) graph to the right. It shows the percent of traffic to our flower sites that comes from search. You can see Proflowers (in red), which has historically relied heavily on search engine marketing, is now getting less of their traffic from search. 1800 flowers on the other hand has stepped up their Search Engine Marketing and is now getting more traffic than ever from search engines.

Search Engine Marketing is often seen as the key factor to driving more traffic. But as Proflowers proves, there are other ways to generate traffic. How did they do it? They have gone old-school with a large-scale radio campaign signing a number of endorsement deals with radio hosts. Who says radio is dead?

Quick reminder: don't forget your Mom -- Mother's Day is just around the corner.

Why Does My Alexa Rank Jump Around? A: The Long Tail

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:04:00 +0000

By now we have all heard of the long tail, which has been used to metaphorically describe just about everything from income distribution to traffic on the Web. Originally coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired article, it refers to a frequency distribution with a long tail, sometimes also referred to as a power law graph. On the Web we have a very long tail, and it means that there are relatively few sites with a lot of traffic and endless numbers of sites with low traffic... the long tail.

While most of us can claim that we understand the meaning of the long tail, it is still often hard to comprehend how this applies to us. I refer specifically to Web site owners with low traffic who see their traffic rank jump around a lot. I was poking around the blogosphere today and ran into this blog entry, the Alexa Experiment. Over the years I have seen a few others like it. Her complaint is that her Alexa rank jumps around quite a bit... in his case from 3.5 million on day 1 of her experiment to 2.8 million on day 13. She uses this as evidence that the Alexa Rank can't be relied upon.

Forgetting about the relative merit of the Alexa Rankings for the moment, a perfect ranking system, one with perfect information about all sites, would tend to behave in the same way. Why? The long tail.

In any ordinal ranking system, like the Alexa Rank, sites out on the long tail will experience massive changes in rank regardless of their actual number of visits, visitors and pageviews. The reason for the fluctuation is because the farther you go out onto the tail the flatter it gets.

I'll use a non-Web example to explain this principle in action. Let's take every person in the United States of America and rank them based on income. That gives us 300 million people ranked from 1 to 300 million, with the person ranked at #1 earning somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and the person ranked #300 million earning nothing, with the rest of us somewhere in between. Like all long tail distributions there are vastly more people on the tail, earning little or no money, than there people at the head of the graph earning hundreds of millions.

If we examine the person ranked at #50 million, let's postulate that she earned $50,000 per year last year, and that she will earn $50,000 again next year. Question: Will she still be ranked at #50 million next year? No. In a shrinking economy her ranking is going to improve because millions of people earned less. Conversely, in a growing economy her position will fall as millions of other workers earning improve. Her rank jumps around wildly, even though her actual earnings have remained unchanged.

What if the economy stayed steady-state, and our $50,000 earner got a raise of exactly $1, and now earns $55,001 per year. What will that do to her rankings? Will her ranking move up by 1 to #49,999,999? No. The long tail distribution tells us that the farther we go out on the tail the more likely it is that there are others earning the exact same amount as her. In her case it could be hundreds or thousands of people. Earning just one dollar more per year can vault her position in the rankings much farther than you may expect.

The point is that the farther you go out on the tail, the less is required to move up an ordinal rank. In a system with a distribution like traffic on the Web this is especially true. If you are out on the tail and you improve your traffic a modest amount it could improve your rank by a million places or more.

That's the nature of the long tail. It is very flat and moving horizontally is not all that hard until you begin to approach the head. For the folks who are running an Alexa Experiment, I wish them the best of luck. But your time would be better spent finding ways to increase your visitors, visits and pageviews. Your Alexa Rank will follow.

Get Rich From Your Blog - Is It Realistic?

noreply@blogger.com (Geoffrey Mack) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:57:00 +0000

Not a day goes by that I don't see a story about making money on the Internet with a blog. It goes something like this:

Step 1: Start writing a blog
Step 2: Put some Google ads on it
Step 3: Sit back and start counting the money

This pitch isn't just limited to the spam that comes pouring into my in-box every day. It often comes from industry publications and reputable Marketing organizations.

But is it true? Is this a gold rush? eMarketer estimates that online ad spending will grow, even in this down economy, to an impressive $24.5 billion this year. That is a lot of dough, and surely some of it will go to the bloggers. But how much? Let's do some math.

Just to thumbnail sketch the landscape, there are well over 50 million unique sites and blogs out there that have some sort of measurable traffic... quadruple that number if you count the sites and blogs that have never seen a visitor. But for the sake of argument let's call it an even 50 million. What would happen if I could magically split the pot of $25 billion evenly among all sites? We would get $500 each.

It won't even pay your Comcast Internet bill.

But traffic on the Web is not divided evenly, and neither are the dollars. The top sites get more than their share. Take a look at the chart on the right for a peek at how traffic is divided up on the web. The Top 100K sites, which represent just a tiny fraction of all the sites on the web (less than .2%) get almost 75% of the traffic. And top sites have sales people who can make sales calls, take ad buyers out to lunch and put together fancy PowerPoint slides. Never underestimate the power of a good PowerPoint slide.

Those top sites are going to take the lion's share of that $25 billion.

Let's take a look at this from another angle. I read an estimate in eMarketer today that the average price for online advertising is currently $2.50 for a thousand impressions (called CPM in the industry parlance.) But that includes the premium prices that the Top Sites charge. What kind of prices do the smaller sites get for their advertising? Pubmatic can tell you in their Quarterly Ad Price Index. Pubmatic manages the advertising for thousands of sites, large and small, so they have some pretty good data. The answer is $.61.

That means that you will get paid 61 cents for every thousand page views on your blog. You can put 4 ads on your blog, bringing your take home to $2.50 per thousand, but beware because you may lose your readers if you overdo it. How many thousands of page views does your blog have per month?

Let's take one of the much touted success stories, The Daily Coyote. The Daily Coyote is a fine blog and the author, Shreve Stockton, takes beautiful photos and has a real passion for her topic. I checked a number of different sources for The Daily Coyote's estimated traffic, and came up with 90,000 page views per month. Assuming the page view count is right, how much does The Daily Coyote bring in?: (90,000 page views per month) * ($2.50 per thousand views) = $225.00 per month. For additional context her blog has an Alexa Rank of 157,000, which is impressive by most standards, and a nearly impossible goal for all but the most successful bloggers.

Speaking of successful bloggers, let's take a look at Om Malik's blog. Estimates say he gets about a million views per month. So, assuming he makes typical CPMs (I would bet he does a bit better...), how much money does this highly successful blog with an Alexa Rank of 13,000 bring in? $2500 per month.

So, what is a poor blogger to do? Do it for the love, not the advertising dollars. Or use your blog to promote something that actually does make money, like a plumbing business, or a bike rental shop. If you do it because you think there is some sort of gold rush going on with advertising dollars on blogs you should think again.

Alexa and the Love You've Been Looking For

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Dawson) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:47:00 +0000

By now you've heard about what's new over at Alexa. In addition to the traffic metrics you already use, we've begun serving up Demographics, Clickstreams, and measures of Search Traffic for virtually any site on the web. Understanding the demographics can be a bit daunting at first, so in today's post we'll explore what the demographics data are all about, and then we'll have some fun seeing who goes where on the web.

The secret to understanding the demographics is this: for any given category, a site's demographics score is the ratio of that category's representation in the site's audience, to that category's representation in the total population of folks who use the internet. That's a mouthful, and I learn best from simple examples, so let's explore the meaning of that statement with a goofy scenario. Let's pretend that the internet is used by just two types of people: the Greens and the Reds. And let's say that the entire population of people who use the internet consists of just six Greens and eight Reds, like in the picture at left.

Now let's imagine a hypothetical site on our tiny internet: ilovegreen.com, and let's suppose that the audience for this site consists of the three Greens and two Reds shown in the picture at right. What would Alexa say about the popularity of ilovegreen.com among the demographic of Green users? Well Greens visit the site at a rate of 3-to-2, while they are represented on the web in general at a rate of just 6-to-8. If you like math, you can divide these rates to see that Greens visit ilovegreen.com at a proportionally higher rate than they surf the web in general; in this simple example, Greens are over-represented in ilovegreen.com's audience by exactly a factor of two. In other words, ilovegreen.com is popular among Greens. (Don't worry: if you don't like math, you'll see below that we publish our demographics data as a handy graphic which captures all the raw numbers in an intuitive way.)

Remember, the fact that this hypothetical site scores high with Greens doesn't tell you about the absolute number of Greens who visit the site. What it does tell you is that Greens are represented in the site's audience to a much greater extent than they are represented out there on the web in general. In that sense, this site is preferred by Greens.

Now that we've gotten the hard part out of the way, let's have some fun. First, let's check out some sites for which we might already have pretty good guesses as to their demographics. In the charts below, a red bar pointing to the left means a category is proportionally under-represented in a site's audience; a green bar pointing to the right means a category is over-represented. So how about ufc.com, the homepage of the Ultimate Fighting Championship?

No surprises here: ufc.com is overwhelmingly preferred by young men. That is to say, men between the ages of 25 to 34 are strongly over-represented in the audience of ufc.com, compared to how they are represented on the internet at large. For the most part, these young men have college educations (or at least they're working on it), they tend not to have kids, and when they're surfing the web for news about, say, Yoshihiro Akiyama (one of the biggest mixed martial arts stars in Asia) they're doing it from home.

Now how about a site on the opposite end of the spectrum? Here are the demographics for nordstrom.com:

I know my sister spends a lot of time there, and apparently she's not alone. The audience for nordstrom.com contains college-educated, 25 to 34 year old women to a much greater extent than does the general internet population. And they tend to do their shopping from work! I'm sure it's on their lunch breaks...

A couple of more no-brainers, while we're at it. What do you suppose is the age distribution for folks who frequent the official website the U.S. Social Security Administration?

You guessed it: the users of ssa.gov skew toward web-surfers in their golden years. And what about folks at the other end of life's journey? Well, you might guess that their parents do some browsing over at landofnod.com, a retail site specializing in kids' furniture. So what do our data have to say about landofnod.com's audience?

Sure enough, they've got kids.

But enough confirming what we might already have guessed. Alexa's all about web discovery, right? Let's do some discovering. One thing folks certainly use the internet for is to find... each other. Three of the big players in the internet dating game are match.com (Alexa rank 359), chemistry.com (Alexa rank 6,517), and plentyoffish.com (Alexa rank 410).

Now imagine you're searching for that special someone, and you want to stand out among all the riff-raff. Check out the gender distribution of match.com:

Men and women are represented at match.com in almost equal proportion to their representation on the internet at large. For a high traffic site, that means there are plenty of men and plenty of women -- so if you're a man trying to stand out among men, or a women trying to stand out among women, you're out of luck. But never fear! Alexa's here to help you, ahem, improve the odds.

Compare the gender distribution of chemistry.com:

to that of plentyoffish.com:

Compared to the general internet population, women are over-represented at chemistry.com, while men are over-represented at plentyoffish.com. So if you're looking for boys, go where the boys are. And if you're looking for girls, go where the girls are!

Perhaps this wasn't what you had in mind when we said that Alexa's data gives you a competitive edge, but then again, who's complaining?