2007 26
What Is Going On With Alexa?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Lately, every single site I check in traffic measuring tool Alexa seems to be losing traffic. Concerned about this trend I decided to check Amazon´s traffic in Alexa. Since Amazon owns Alexa, I thought it would be surprising if Alexa showed a decline on Amazon´s traffic as well. But this is what I saw. Enormous decline in Amazon traffic over the last 12 months.
Frankly I can´t believe that traffic to Amazon has dropped 50% over the last year so I don´t understand what is going on with Alexa. At this point I am concerned about the lack of reliable measures for traffic on the Internet.
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devendra on March 26, 2007 ·
Lack of compatablity with new browsers such as maxathon are an issue.
more seriously all antispyware programs like Norton anti-virus, trendmicro, spybot recognise the toolbar as spyware…and then autodeleting it.
This isnt so much of a big deal for Amazon who runs Alexa as a giant research project; but it is a big deal for anyone seeking to use this for reliable analysis.
Alexa’s day has, unfortunately, passed.
Sokratis on March 27, 2007 ·
The overall downloads of the toolbar do not make a difference. Alexa’s results are always based on using a sample (the people who have the toolbar installed on their browser) to extrapolate general trends. So the overall size of the sample is neutral to this calculation.
What is important is the distribution within the sample. According to valleywag, there has been a large increase of downloads in China and India, probably by spammers, which would significantly skew the overall results, showing a decline in traffic for everyone else.
Only services like hitwise and comscore that use ISP log files can claim accurate measurement, unfortunately they cost too much for your average startup ;-(
Arno, you can download an add-on for Firefox that will show Alexa and Page Rank for each page you visit, but also feed back to Alexa from here: http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
Vicente on March 27, 2007 ·
If that’s the US view of traffic, then it could correlate with the economy. Over the last few years people’s budgets have tightened quite abit. The whole thing with the housing market has been going on for a few years but it’s gotten pretty bad over the last year with foreclosures increasing significantly.
Just a guess.
Juan Navidad on March 30, 2007 ·
Alexa does not work or, at least, it is not exact. And I can show it easily. I have to websites. Mi personal web is three or four times more visited than the other (always a great difference between them), but Alexa sometimes has showed a better positioning in the less visited of both. That’s why I give you the reason, Martin: there is no doubt that Alexa can be quite useful, but not reliable.
j.n.
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arno nyhm on March 26, 2007 ·
alexa isnt trustable and reliable for me. installing alexa toolbar? in firefox? not possible. check: http://www.alexa.com/site/help/?index=127 ; and whats about firefox? increasing numbers, isn´t it? doesnt FON optimize its maps for Firefox too? Nobody has a need to install alexa´s toolbar any more, so numbers MUST decline as a natural side effect. do not relay on this…
just my2Dollars 🙂