Comments on: The Great Alexa Spike of 2006

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:24:43 +0000

Has anyone looked into Hitwise, they charge a bucket load for their service but its nearly 100% accurate with rankings. They actually buy the log files from ISP’s all over the world, doesnt get much more accurate than that.

By: franco78

franco78 — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 22:53:46 +0000

I thought I was the only one wondering what Alexa is been up to.

By: BlogCadre

BlogCadre — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 07:29:07 +0000

Digging Alexa – how the geek demographic doubled overnight

It seems to have passed without huge fanfare, but on April 20th 2006, the Alexa rankings for tech sites around the globe suddenly doubled, literally overnight. The Day The World Got Geeky Ian Clarke writes, "Did the world get geekier around April 2

By: 3PointRoss

3PointRoss — Wed, 10 May 2006 01:19:02 +0000

I have never been completely convinced the benefits of Alexa and Alexa ratings. It seems it is too easily manipulated and its ratings doesn’t directly reflect the real world situation of a website.

By: AlexW

AlexW — Fri, 05 May 2006 00:12:49 +0000

soomp, you’ve actually provided an interesting spin to it. Comparing graphs, your spike starts about 4-6 weeks earlier than the others, so it’s probably initiated by a different source.

I’m wondering if maybe something like a Korean language version of the toolbar or extension was released recently?

By: soomp

soomp — Thu, 04 May 2006 23:56:28 +0000

wow - i just discovered this site today, and i was wondering the exact same thing! check out my site stats. there's this huge and unexplicable jump right around easter (mid-march). at first i thought i must be totally awesome or something ;P, but something must have changed in their system. i'd be interested if anyone figures this out! :D boss at soompi dot com.

By: AlexW

AlexW — Thu, 04 May 2006 01:32:41 +0000

Doesn’t seem likely. Couldn’t imagine that Adsense would be more common on tech sites than non-tech sites

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 04 May 2006 01:13:07 +0000

Do you think it could be related to Google Ads?

By: adholes

adholes — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 04:31:07 +0000

Alex, great point. Just to clarify, both sites have around 5,000 users, but Punknet has much more traffic. And I only wish we had ad sales that people wanted to track. If anyone can figure out how to sell ads to ad people, please let me know! :)

By: AlexW

AlexW — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 23:50:10 +0000

What did Churchill say?

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

I think something similar holds pretty true for Alexa.

Adholes, while I agree your punk audience would be unlikely to install the toolbar, I also think it’s highly likely many of your Advertising network users would be running the ‘SearchStatus’ extension, and that would explain the high rank and the spikes.

In real terms, I would guess there may only be 3 or 4 users in your punk audience with either the bar or the extension. You may only have 500 advertising users, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 50-100 of them had the extension installed — if you’re buying or selling advertising inventory Alexa data is a tool of the trade.

See, Alexa always tends to look it’s worst when you’re comparing apples and oranges (advertising guys and punks in this case) but you generally don’t need that sort of data. Most of time you want to know whether to purchase ‘Site X’ or advertise on ‘Site Y’, and what you really need to know is how those sites compare with their direct competitors.

My view is, if you compared adholes.com against a competing site with a similar demographic, you’d most likely find the data more credible and more useful.