Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Alexa Rankings

Alexa is a website rankings company. You've probably seen them mentioned here and there in news articles.

I was suddenly curious. How is the EVE news battle going? TheMittani.com versus EVENews24.com. I'll throw up some other popular EVE related sites for comparison.

eveonline.com
Global Rank: 9,980

battleclinic.com
Global Rank: 56,843

eve-kill.net
Global Rank: 76,139

eve-central.com
Global Rank: 82,321

evemaps.dotlan.net
Global Rank: 83,840

eve-search.com
Global Rank: 116,162

eveuniversity.org
Global Rank: 138,007

themittani.com
Global Rank: 156,598

evenews24.com
Global Rank: 162,984

eve-files.com
Global Rank: 189,173

failheap-challenge.com
Global Rank: 243,598

eveboard.com
Global Rank: 307,309

kugutsumen.com
Global Rank: 487,497

eveskunk.com
Global Rank: 1,041,859

tigerears.org
Global Rank: 1,641,996

jestertrek.blogspot.com
Global Rank: 1,744,787

evealtruist.com
Global Rank: 2,679,246

mylootyourtears.com
Global Rank: 3,475,576

evebloggers.com
Global Rank: 5,049,517

poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca
Global Rank: 5,534,517

freebooted.blogspot.com
Global Rank: 5,689,967

evetravel.wordpress.com
Global Rank: 5,946,814

gamerchick.net
Global Rank: 8,342,690

interstellarprivateer.wordpress.com
Global Rank: 11,449,358

Kind of amazing that TheMittani has overtaken EVENews24 in such a short time span. EVENews24 was, for the longest time, the only news source for EVE Online. Players were obviously starved for a different perspective, because to overtake the leader in about three months is an impressive feat. They're both worth reading, since they are often polar opposites of each other.

As an aside, very surprised to see any blog outranking Ripard Teg. Even more surprising that it's Tiger Ears. Whereas Tiger's is a very good blog and a fun read, it's just a daily accounting of one character's adventures. If anyone could outrank Ripard, I would have expected it to be a blog in the same vein, game discussion and opinion.

20 comments :

  1. I overtook both, greedygoblin.blogspot.com: 1413202
    On the other hand I don't think that traffic means so much for non-monetized sites.

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  2. For further comparison. Reddit is ranked 132. SomethingAwful is ranked 7,553.

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  3. Alexa ranking doesn't mean much, it's calculation methods are retarded and requires the user to have the Alexa extension installed in their browser for their visits to even be tracked.

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    Replies
    1. I'm not so sure. I don't think one can look at the list and argue much about the relative popularity and usage of sites by the playerbase compared to other sites on the list.

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    2. Kura is correct. Alexa is a business, offering a product/service, in order to drive more traffic to your site.

      As a result, their tracking numbers are heavily biased towards sites which specifically use their product/service. In addition, they use their tracking numbers to solicit folks with lower rankings to sign up with them, in order to get their ranking up. In most cases, their numbers are misleading, and might even be considered a conflict of interest, since they gain no benefit from showing that your Alexa ranking has dropped lower *after* you sign up with them.

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    3. Tiger Ears may have an outside audience when posting about concerts and music in addition to EVE. I wonder if you could ask each of them for their site stats to compare to this list.

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    4. You both have a point. Alexa's ranking methods are horrible, specially since they require the plugin to count people and thus many think they are meaningless. The same can be said of Nielsen TV ratings, which are commonly taken only in metropolitan areas and only from people that have little nielsen boxes installed on their TV's. Many people think ratings are meaningless in determining if a show is a hit or not (look at Firefly for crying out loud!).

      But still, advertising agencies and tv stations and networks use Nielsen ratings to determine viewership and ad pricing. TV shows basically live or die by their ratings; Alexa is sometimes used the same way on the web. The standards suck but it's what we have, even though I'm sure something better could be devised.

      It's one of the reasons TV land so often resorts to active phone surveys of target population samples. If done correctly the results are much more meaningful.

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    5. They haven't used solely toolbar data for a while. It's a bit silly that they built their reputation while they did only use the toolbar, though.

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    6. @Mordis Ah. I did not know about all the other utility Tiger's had on her site. I'm going to go look into it now.

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    7. @MM506 - Firefly? Look at the original Star Trek series for a much better example. Do you know how much money Paramount has made on the Star Trek franchise, after the original series was cancelled due to poor ratings?

      As an expert in statistics, I can guarantee that any statistical sampling or poll is only as valid as the original data which goes into it. Bias, limit or dilute the sample in any way, shape or form and you've completely invalidated the result.

      This fact is commonly used by pollsters in popular elections to say what they want to say - which is why you often see conflicting poll results which tell you that all of the candidates are tracking to win the election. And, ofc, I can prove to you, statistically, that a cup can indeed be both half empty and half full.

      Alexa ratings are particularly bad, as they are specifically biased in order to garner more business. Our company has been solicited by Alexa frequently to use their tools & service - so much so that we added them to our email spam blocker.

      You'd do much better to use Google's search results, as a measure of relative popularity.

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    8. Kura's absolutely correct in that Alexa and other panel based methods (like Compete) are pretty useless in trying to measure relative traffic between sites, but what they are pretty good at is measuring the trends for an individual site. That is, if a site's traffic is growing or declining according to Alexa that's a pretty good indicator that's actually happening.

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  4. I am suprised FHC is more popular than kugutsumen.

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  5. Site Information for ninveah.com
    Alexa Traffic Rank: 5,409,229
    \o/

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  6. Woot I'm #11 Million! Give or take. :) Also since I'm not in the Blog Pack (too few posts) I am not surprised to be so far behind the Pack members.

    Also remember that Tiger Ears has a rather spectacular tool that gets referred to all the time, namely the wormhole colors page. I would bet the vast majority of the hits are to that specific page, especially since CCP Manifest linked it just in the last few days.

    Fun analysis.

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  7. The Alexa rank is very flawed way to measure traffic between small websites, I got access to Mitten's "Water Cooler" stats and I can say we hold much more traffic.

    Remember, Alexa utilizes a quite flawed measurement technique which is heavily dependent in that Alexa bar usage and some other seemingly "magical" elements.

    I remember applying for an ad network like a year ago and while comparing the monthly traffic of their existing publisher found how a site with only 100.000 pageviews (not even uniques) had an alexa rank half as big as mine.

    In the end the only true way to compare traffic is to have a google analytics dump side by side, having used different tools and compared to my very own analytics (to check which is the most accurate one), I came up with:

    Evenews24 holds around 90,000 uniques/month
    TheMittani.com is around 65,000 uniques/month

    From the other third party sites Eve-kill should be around 220k/mo

    Contrary to what people would like to think, my monthly impressions went up after mittens site came out, neither of us are paid sites and I see no reason why people cannot visit both sides the same way I visit Gizmodo and Engadget regularly.

    On your list kugutsumen.com should be on top of FHC. Eve skunk only gets 6,000 uniques (I know since i was offered to buy the site), which should be far more than your own uniques.

    So yeah in the end Kura is right, Alexa is retarded and akin of counting how many idiots install that shitty bar.

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    Replies
    1. Damage Control II now fitted to en24

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  8. I think Google is pretty influential in your Alexa score, or at least mirrors your ranking in some way.

    That is my theory for why my site comes in at 996,043 when it is pretty clear that Jester gets more traffic, more links, more comments, and posts more often. (Not to mention just being fine EVE blog.) But Google seems to love my site, thanks largely I think to Google image search and the fact that I post a lot of pictures.

    Take that tidbit for what it is worth I suppose.

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  9. Don't harsh my buzz, man. I'm number one! ...million, six-hundred and forty-one thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-six!

    But, yeah, I bet most of that's due to my table of wormhole colours.

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  10. Fiddler's Edge (fiddlersedge.blogspot.com) is rocking the net at 7,893,906. Gunning for you Kirith and Poetic. Might even post more often.

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  11. Mittani has both THE name and content. EVEnews only got content.

    BTW: Torchwood Archives by Lukas Rox (pozniak.pl) Rank:4,144,438

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