April 19th, 2009
As I have announced in this post, my ebook, Directory Marketing Reborn, has just been updated. However, there was a little issue with the existing customers.
Well I am happy to inform everyone that this issue has now been resolved and I have just emailed you all the update download link! Please check your email and get the free update.
In case you have not subscribed to my newsletter when first purchasing the book, I had no way of contacting you. There were not many of you - but if you’re one of these people please ping me and let me know the email you have used when buying the book - I will send you a newsletter subscription link.
Hope you enjoy my updated directory ebook with a refreshed and expanded directory list as well as a special worksheet to track your progress. As always, your feedback is more than welcome so let me know what you think of it and send me all your comments and suggestions.
April 19th, 2009
After the Alexa update post, I was wondering just how Alexa top sites data compares to its main competitors - Compete and Quantcast. What is the most reliable source of data about sites’ traffic? Should we just check all the 3 if we want an adequate picture? I checked and here’s what I have found out.
Compete.com lists the following sites as top sites by traffic volume:
1 google.com
2 yahoo.com
3 live.com
4 facebook.com
5 msn.com
6 ebay.com
7 youtube.com
8 wikipedia.org
9 amazon.com
10 microsoft.com
Quantcast.com lists pretty much the same sites though in slightly different order, save for Amazon that goes missing in its list and MySpace appearing instead:
1 google.com
2 yahoo.com
3 live.com
4 msn.com
5 facebook.com
6 youtube.com
7 wikipedia.org
8 microsoft.com
9 myspace.com
10 ebay.com
Alexa’s Top Sites list has only 2 entries for Microsoft’s sites instead of 3 like the other two sources. Two new entries also appear - Blogger.com and the Chinese search engine Baidu:
-
Google
-
Yahoo!
-
YouTube
-
Facebook
-
Windows Live
-
Microsoft Network (MSN)
-
Wikipedia
-
Blogger.com
-
Myspace
-
Baidu.com
I guess the difference could be explained by different sources of data the 3 sites use (Alexa relies mainly on its toolbar while Compete gets the ISP and hosting data and Quantcast relies a lot on site owners adding its code to their sites a.k.a. “Quantifying” them)
But I’ve also found something proving an extra time how easily Alexa can be manipulated, at least in the short term. It has another list of sites called Hot URLs where it lists the sites with highest traffic at the moment, updated every 5 minutes. At the time I checked it, among usual suspects like Yahoo! News, Twitter or YouTube, I have noticed the following URL:
Make Money At Home Online http://*url obscured*
(but it was nothing more than just an IP - the person didn’t even bother to register a domain!)
- ranking as high as #8!
April 17th, 2009
Alexa, for all it’s worth, has just had a major update of their site. I guess they decided to cater more to those advertisers and media buyers who use Alexa data of sites as a measure for buying or selling online ad space and kinda try to catch up with Compete, Quantcast and other similar services. Oh my, everybody is so much into all kinds of data mashup these days!
Here’s the list of features Alexa had added:
- Demographics - provides a demographic breakdown for virtually any site, including gender, age, education and more
- Clickstream - shows the sites visitors were on before and after any site
- Search Traffic - shows how much traffic a site gets from search engines
Nothing really new and all those other services are offering it all already but if they want to play like the big boys, they can’t skip it all.
But just how much of a fail for Alexa to have its official blog on Blogspot? Come on people are you Google or something?
