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Who Will Be First to Sue Alexa?
Alexa, oh Alexa, how you kill thee. I’ve written and spoken about Alexa since they began operations nearly a decade ago. I’ve watched agencies pitch advertising based on Alexa charts. There are still ad networks that use Alexa rankings as a baseline for pricing Web site advertising.
Considering how wrong Alexa is, I’ve wondered for a long time who would be the first one to sue Alexa for an incorrect ranking. For sites that drive revenue from advertising, an incorrect ranking can impact their direct ability to generate revenue.
Alexa changed their ranking model back in April and since then everything has gone downhill for most sites I track. Currently CN has a 1-week average rank of 194,000 while my other site HTMLCenter has a rank of 78,000. There’s only one issue, CN has 6-10x more traffic on average than HTMLCenter does.
Here are some additional thoughts in my Alexa video:
Daniel Scocco compared 15 Web sites using Alexa, Compete and Google Trends. It’s interesting to see just how off Alexa is overall. Andy Beard believes that Alexa is no longer counting social media traffic and that’s why we have seen even more ranking drops for sites that rely on social media traffic. I would tend to agree with Andy but CN has very little social media traffic – we had one digg frontpage in the last 60 days.
If Alexa is removing social media traffic (they haven’t said anything yet about this latest change), that’s an excellent step forward. I’ve said before that just because a site has more raw pageviews than another, doesn’t mean it’s worth anything more – especially if they are gaming the social media sites. But I am not convinced Alexa has made this change.
I’ve tried sending emails to Alexa, but I have never received a reply. Which is so unlike Amazon considering how responsive and fast they are to customer service emails. It’s almost like Bezos ignores Alexa for some unknown reason.
Perhaps it’s finally time to turn off Alexa.
If they want to use another company and build their business upon someone else’s business its their own loss. My opinion.
not sure I understand what you mean… could you rephrase?
Yes, Alexa please go bye bye!
Sorry. What I meant was that people should not base their business success upon the working of another company like Alexa, because if that big company fails they struggle.
For instance they should build their own tracking system instead of depending on Alexa.
Alan, it’s an interesting question but I don’t think anyone would file suit. Show me two analytic services that agree on site traffic even if they use similar methodologies. I think all the services have a margin of error, some much greater than others. If I were pitching businesses, I wouldn’t rely on Alexa numbers. I would be more inclined to look at some sort service like Quantcast’s verified numbers.
I think as far as legal process, if anyone was going to do anything it would have been over Google PageRank last October for paid links, because the green bar is every bit as make believe with a hand fudge factor as Alexa these days.
Ultimately Alexa will use the same reasoning as Google, though Google use terms such as “importance” and “authority”, and Alexa use vague relative traffic.
The evidence on the social media being discounted is very storng, especially on sites like Collective Thoughts that don’t gain a huge amount of traffic, but have the occasional hit on SU or Reddit – those traffic bumps have been removed.
The evidence on the totally messed up equations and double-dipping we hammered out a lot in private before posting. Something is certainly screwed up, but far too obvious a screwup to have got through even fairly careless QA
As long as Alexa is the ranking that my advertising revenue depends on, I’m paying attention to them!
W/o access to logs you’re getting an estimate, I think most people know that.
If you’re an advertiser, serve the banner yourself (hotlinked off the website you’re advertising on) and you can track the traffic yourself.
Alexa hasn’t been around that long either, I wouldn’t give them too much credit.
The issue PJ is that if advertisers use Alexa as part of their decision criteria, they will never get to your point. If the advertiser works with a site, then yes, they can certainly do what you suggest.
I thought everyone with a clue was using quantcast by now.
The only way quantcast works is if everyone uses the quantified option. Otherwise the comparisons from real-to-fake are meaningless.
Mark, Quantcast is a nice website, but their numbers say Facebook is primarily 14 y/o black girls. Is that true?
No matter how rubbish Alexa rankings are, peoples still using it; like there’s a popularity contest! SIGH!!
I agree it’s a problem if the data isn’t accurate, I was browsing TextLinkAds yesterday and they post an Alexa range (and PageRank) for every site in their network.