Alexa offers new paid services - alrighty then!

Alexa is now offering a few new services that I have noticed today. There are new sponsored ads and paid reports.

Sponsored ads - so Alexa is now offering blogger-style 125px square ads on their home page (and from what I can tell also non-url lookup pages). The ads "start" at $15,000 per month and Alexa claims an average of 1 million views per day to the home page. If you are interested, check out the details on their advertising page. So far it looks the ads are all in-house or partner ads.... britepic is from their partner adbrite, aws is from their parent company Amazon, 43things ad is from their t-shirt partner and the other ads are default. I am sure they will be able to sell some of these ads relatively easy.

Paid reports - they may have been doing this all along but now it is linked from everywhere. The paid reports allow you to purchase reports larger than the free Top-500 they list on the site. Reports range from $1k to $6.5k for the top 100k sites. I like this line, "Now you can leverage Alexa's web intelligence to power your own business with Alexa Top Sites." Hmm, so what they don't say is that this data is only from users who use the Alexa toolbar. It also looks like the reports are only global reports and are distributed via a csv file. Would have been nice to see some graphs and interactivity for the fee. I would still stick to Hitwise and the like for paid reports. Hitwise might be a bit more expensive but the return will be more valuable. The Alexa reports might be good for some baseline information.