Earlier today, I was checking out some new questions in the TechCrunch topic area on Quora. One in particular caught my eye: How was TechCrunch traffic affected by their major redesign in July 2011?
This has been something I’ve seen asked here and there given the radical changes we implemented — and, I assume, given the audience issues Gawker faced after their recent redesign. Mostly, people seem to want to know: is TechCrunch tanking?
I was set to weigh in, when I noticed that someone else already had. This person (not affiliated with TechCrunch) painted a picture in which our site was essentially crashing and burning since the redesign (the answer has since been removed by Quora, presumably due to down-voting). Their source? Compete. → Read More
Jason Calacanis, our partner over the years on the TechCrunch50 conference, wrote quite a rant yesterday about analytics company Comscore. His argument: that Comscore has vastly undercounted traffic and visitors over the years, and is now formalizing “their extortion ring” by offering to track traffic more directly (and the numbers are generally much higher) via tracking pixels for a $10,000/year fee.
You can read the whole post over at Calacanis.com. He doesn’t pull any punches (in fact he goes on a tangent about punching bullies in the face as a kid) He suggests that companies refuse to pay Comscore for the service, and that investors short the stock.
Comscore investor Fred Wilson laid into Jason with a couple of comments on a copy of the post on Posterous. He also randomly dragged me into the argument (I think he’s still mad about the Zynga stuff): → Read More
Amazon Web Services is discontinuing the Alexa Site Thumbnail service, which has been providing developers with programmatic access to millions of thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites that were stored in Alexa’s index since July 2006. New subscriptions are no longer being accepted, and existing subscribers will only have operational access until June 12, 2009. The service hits the deadpool.
Alexa Site Thumbnail was a paying service (developers were charged $0.0002 / thumbnail URL returned i.e. $0.20 per 1,000 thumbnail URLs) but in an e-mail sent out to developers Amazon admits that it never really took off and that the company will do the smart thing and focus their resources on more popular services.
Update: commenters are pointing to Girafa and PageGlimpse as alternatives. There’s also Websnapr, bluga webthumb, scURLr, etc. → Read More
Everyone’s favorite web statistics whipping boy Alexa has announced a major overhaul of how it compiles traffic figures. The biggest change is Alexa’s decision to drop exclusive reliance on the Alexa toolbar for traffic data, with Alexa now aggregating data from “multiple sources” to compile its statistics and web rankings. As part of the move, historical data from Alexa is no longer available, with data now only going back 9 months (we presume calculated using the new methodology). Alexa is spinning the decision as a step forward without admitting to previous flaws: Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter. The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users. A search of tech blogs saw many with significant drops in rank, where as political sites have had big boosts. For example TechCrunch and the Drudge Report were tracking similar figures on Alexa prior to the change, where as now the Drudge Report is a mile out in front. Although regularly derided in the past for its often bizarre results (like YouTube having more traffic that Google), Alexa has continued to maintain popularity due to its broad global reach and completely free service provision. Time will tell if Alexa has done enough to appease its strong and vocal critics. CrunchBase Information Alexa Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
One of the top stories in the blogosphere today is a new Hitwise chart finding that Photobucket has a 46% leading market share in online photosharing and that Flickr is in 6th place with only 6%. This was a big surprise for parts of the blogosphere where Flickr is a hot topic. I looked up these two sites on Alexaholic and found traffic results quite different from the Hitwise graph. Many people have long alleged that Alexa produces low-quality results, is easy to game and is worthy of lots of other criticism. If that’s is the case, is Yahoo! really the most visited site on the web? Is MySpace really number 5? Many of us talk about those numbers, from Alexa, often. (Though Hitwise seems to find similar numbers.) Graph below: Flickr traffic in blue, Photobucket in red. Webshots.com in green. Speaking of graphs, here’s some interesting ones that quantify what many people in today’s discussion are saying: the loudest voices in the blogosphere are missing the boat by talking about Flickr all the time. Flickr may be worthy of blog coverage for its innovation or it’s participation in innovative communities or its role in controversy – but among most of the bloggers online Photobucket is a much hotter topic! Check out these graphs, measuring the times that the words Flickr or Photobucket appear in blogs with many inbound links (“high authority”) according to Technorati vs. in blogs without many inbound links. I think the results are remarkable. Here’s some imprecise but telling math: high-authority bloggers appear to write about Flickr about 3 times as often as they (we) write about Photobucket. The blogosphere as a whole uses the word Photobucket 3 or more times as often as we use the word Flickr. (TechCrunch has used the word Flickr 11 times more often than the word Photobucket.) Does that mean high-authority bloggers are out of touch with the bulk of users? It may; it may also mean that being interesting doesn’t equate with mass adoption. In the graphs below, “high authority” on top, all blogs on bottom, Flickr mentions on left, Photobucket mentions on right. → Read More
Amazon have been beta testing their web search platform and we have managed to get a hold of some screenshots as well as some information about it. Alexa is giving users and developers access to their crawler in order to build their own search engines. From the website: The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents — even create their own search engines — using Alexa’s search and publication tools. Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service. It seems that users will be able to create any type of search engine, indexing particular types of data or a single or set of particular sites. This service seems to be very powerfull and ambitious, how well it works has not yet been determined. There is a form on the site to register for the beta, but we know that there are only a very small number of users at the moment so your chances of getting in soon are small. → Read More
John Battelle has the scoop – Alexa is making its dataI available on the Amazon.com Web Services platform, and it’s a really big deal. Amazon’s Alexa is opening up its 5 billion web documents and 100 terabytes of data to anyone who wants to use it. Included in this data are Alexa’s famous site rankings based on toolbar users. As John says, this certainly opens up entirely new classes of search engines and other applications that can be built by leveraging this data. Alexa is charging for its data, but it isn’t much. The first 10,000 requests per month are free. Thereafter, requests are charged at a rate of $.00015 each (just 15 cents per thousand requests.). For example, if you make 100,000 requests to the Alexa Web Information Service during a given month, you will be charged $13.50. Your first 10,000 requests are free, while your remaining 90,000 requests are charged at a rate of $.00015 each: .00015 * 90000 = $13.50. This is a developing story and some of the links are not live yet. More on this as things progress. UPDATE: Richard MacManus, Om Malik and Dan Farber have more. → Read More
