Alexa

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.

The lawsuit filed by Amazon against Statsaholic is making its way around the blogo' today. I haven't read the entire 43 page filing yet (see Mashable for the filing and boycott info), but many around the 'sphere are calling for a boycott of Amazon.

See StartupMeme, Andy's Marketing Pilgrim and TechFold for more specifics on the boycott.

Some have called out Amazon for bullying. Frankly, I don't understand why Amazon didnt offer Ron (Statsaholic founder) some purchase option. I can only imagine that Ron never expected this when he created his popular service. It is also odd that Amazon/Alexa has complimented Ron several times on their blog. While I am not an attorney, I can only imagine this will help Ron's case.

Will the land of the blog be able to help sway Amazon to drop the lawsuit? Will some larger media outlet pick up the story? Stay tuned! You can also read our past coverage of Alexa...

Would you be worried about building a widget or service based on another's technology based on the Amazon filing today?

Have you ever wondered what web, database and network servers some of the biggest new tech sites are running? What about their network connectivity and admin passwords?

Pingdom, a web site monitoring service, contacted the companies below and put together a pretty great report. You can download the report here or check out their full blog entry.

Come inside to check out the companies in the report plus a bit of my commentary.

Alexa has added some new options to their site pages. While I can't take credit for them all, I certainly hope my constant nagging about the "today vs. yesterday" got them to change it. Whatever the reason, I can rejoice, thanks Geoff! Here is an overview of the changes: geographic reporting, "yesterday", reach figures, and traffic ranks by country.

Come inside for a screenshot plus more discussion on the updates.

Back in November, I discussed Alexa when Jason Calacanis discussed how he could easily game the system by just using a couple computers and an internet connection. Today I want to give you three more concrete reasons why Alexa is broken.

I am starting to wonder if Technorati is the new Alexa. And let me say that I like the Technorati service a lot. I enjoy using the site both as a publisher and as a visitor. Technorati appears to be more interested in their BuzzTV clips than in customer service and creating a service that is flawless in execution.

I have provided a video and screenshots of the issue to aid Technorati staffers in getting the issue fixed. This issue could be costing bloggers actual revenue so I hope it is taken care of as soon as possible.

Jason Calacanis posted today about trying to show how easy it is to game Alexa. Would rather see more productive articles out of the web/blog leader than to see gaming Alexa articles which have been done over and over since Alexa began.

There is one easy way to game Alexa: create good, original content.