Comments on: Move Over Alexa, Here Comes IZEARanks

By: BlogsPageRank

BlogsPageRank — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:22:51 +0000

Izearanks is the Alexa of splogs. Pure and simple.

By: Star Trekker

Star Trekker — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 18:58:52 +0000

Why do you say the length of our visit to a site can’t be measured?

By: Robin

Robin — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:12:17 +0000

Hi, From what I can gather the “democratic” aspect of the web, meaning the concept of a wide, virtually global, audience whose activity can be analysed by traffic monitoring algorithms, is a fiction on two counts. Firstly there is the fundamental and fatal problem of the completely unsuitable character of the only data that can be obtained (IP addresses). This is an innate technical problem which as far as I know is insoluable. You simply can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear no matter how brilliant you are! But worse is that the use of this almost completely meaningless data drives advertising spend which drives the entire edifice of the www. To illustrate this, consider a simple example of a flawed-data driven solution. Google has a feature that “learns” from your visiting habits so that it can prioritise its display for you. Great, we think, less “junk”. It does this by analysing the sites you “hit”. Even assuming that this data didn’t have the fundamental flaws referred to above, AND is not biaased towards advertisers/google-analytics etc, the algorithm can obtain no information on whether the site you hit was relevant. We might open and close a site in moments, but the duration of our visit to a page cannot be measured. Even if it could some valuable resources take time to decipher and some are just full of rubbish. Both take time. We might surf as a function of successful research, or because the results we are getting are useless, poor quality, or irrelevant. As the “machine” cannot know this, it resorts to clever maths. The application of these results in the creation of a virtual herd. Natural herd insticts have evolved over time and similarly these virtual-herd-instincts do. a sort of mass-movement, similar to the mass-hysteria at 60’s pop-concerts, or tail-backs on motorways, or . Individually they drift away. It doesn’t matter what relevance the sites provided by the search are, those are the ones I must use. It is the science of self-fulfilling prophesy! I have been writing a blog on or off for over a year. I wanted to attract visitors. But as the ascendance of blogs up the listings of search engines grows the more frustrated I get. I don’t go to libraries to read the guest book diaries. I guess I have come to realise that IMHO there is such a thing as brilliance and that such merit cannot be awarded in any generalised democratic process either by man or machine.

By: Smackall

Smackall — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:05:49 +0000

Alexa gives good ranking only for top few sites. Few sites, I mean around 100K sites. Rest always keep moving in rank

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:03:15 +0000

Alexa rankings are flawed and you can’t draw a conclusion easily. Two examples.

John Chow, last time I checked he was below 5K in Alexa with traffic below 200K per month. Why is that so ? Because many webmasters with the Alexa toolbar installed visit his website. why do they all have the Alexa toolbar installed ? Because some services use the Alexa rank, besides other parameters, to sell ads, links whatever on a blog.

Second example. I’m creating a web two-point-0 project with a friend of mine, the website is currently protected and no one can access it. The domain however does have a Alexa rank of roughly one million. Why is that ? Because I have the Alexa bar installed. The site supposedly ranks sub 30K for all sites of my country, to be exact 22K which is ridiculous.

By: Micah

Micah — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:40:10 +0000

I think it’s a good idea, but Alexa is so far ahead of them…it’ll be hard to beat such a well established company. Anyway, Alexa is fine if you rank pretty high.

By: Smackall

Smackall — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:33:59 +0000

From my point of view, Alexa is standing in good position today as user can do nothing to bring their rank up. They can track entries from same ip and assume its the web master’s ip. So the web master has nothing to do with Alexa ranking… Thats why some people still love alexa.

But in your case, Scripts can be easily simulated and people can bring their website to top. :|

By: Move over Alexa

Move over Alexa — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:46:33 +0000

By: Joseph Plazo

Joseph Plazo — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:46:10 +0000

You know what I’d love? Google showing a TrafficRank icon on its toolbar, aside from Pagerank. The big G has a toolbar in more people’s browsers than Alexa. That I’m sure off. And lost of folks use its search engines, directories and analytics scripts. That being the case, G can come up with more reliable traffic data than the upstarts

By: mlankton

mlankton — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:01:28 +0000

IZEARanks is targeted at blogs, so I think they are only concerned with ranking the blogosphere. In fact, one of the flags that users can toggle is to flag your site as not a blog.

My big beef with Alexa and Compete is that they injure my pride by reporting my site as having a very small percentage of it’s actual traffic. :)

I see your point though. Quantcast suffers from some of the same problems. They rank the whole internet, but unless you are running their script the numbers are estimates. I am also wondering how Quantcast comes up with their demographic info, since last time I checked Firefox doesn’t broadcast your race, gender, age or annual income.

We wouldn’t be discussing this at all if Google got into the web metrics business. Google, are you listening?

By: Kline

Kline — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:45:50 +0000

Well, showing your information to potential advertisers and showing them to the world are completely different.

It isn’t a ‘flawed’ metric in the same sense, but it is still flawed. With IZEA model, you will only be able to compare yourself to others that are all in. You are either in or you arent. With alexa, at least everyone is on the table. You could be the #1 site on the internet by IZEA’s metrics, but really only have 10k hits per day. None of the big sites would *ever* consider giving away such info. It makes the results just as invalid.

As a user, I enjoy my toolbar that shows alexa/compete/PR of various pages. It’s not terribly useful for me as a user, but I enjoy it all the same. I can see why users would appreciate this, but website owners gain nothing, besides a meaningless number (and some stats that they could get by themselves without using the service).

I guess I’m looking at it from the perspective of the ‘big’ sites. They gain nothing from this, and it is only harmful. For small sites, your info isnt worth anything, so go ahead and throw your hat into the ring. Get some artificially high ‘ranking’

By: mlankton

mlankton — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:29:12 +0000

I really doubt that users care. I think you care, for vanity and for seeing how you rate against the competition. I think the competition cares for the same reasons you do. I think visits and pageviews (along with a click audit) are the biggest justification you can show your private sponsors why they are paying you what they are.

If that scares anyone, they must be overcharging their sponsors.

Tell me where I’m wrong here, because I must not get it. Besides, IZEA let’s you hide the stats from public display, only showing your rank.

I can see your point about over disclosure. Quantcast lists a lot of data publicly. Perhaps the best thing for them to do would be to keep their rank public and require an advertiser account with secure login to see the meat and potatoes.

At the end of the day, no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to disclose their traffic stats. A lot of people put stock in Alexa rating, and we know how flawed their system is. IZEA and Quantcast are trying to offer systems that provide meaningful data. I’m sure we can agree that their approach to web metrics is far less flawed than the big names in metrics.

By: Kline

Kline — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:11:27 +0000

yea, but izearanks doesn’t make any sense. It doesnt solve the problem, and its not viable. Honestly, the amount of traffic you get is information that honestly, no user has the right to know. Alexa/compete are nice for what they are, but do you really want/need down to the exact number stats about your site around? I think it would bite a lot of people in the ass.

By: mlankton

mlankton — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:19:54 +0000

If IZEA keeps IZEARanks separate from the stuff they do that offends Google, I don’t think their users should be penalized. There is nothing “bad neighborhood” about offering a service like IZEARanks, as long as it isn’t being used as a method to determine how much they should pay someone for a PPP article.

The main point was, Alexa and Compete are a joke. At least someone is trying to come up with a system that has relevant data. Quantcast, which I just implemented on my site, also bears looking at.

By: Kline

Kline — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:01:09 +0000

eh, but then you are giving out your analytics account to someoen else, and you cant run it in parallel..

And, it will never allow you to compare against big sites, as that information is highly confidential, and they would never agree to post it like that.

I guess i just don’t see what site owners gain by giving away that kind of information.

By: julia

julia — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:47:26 +0000

they say if u paste that snippet on your blog, google will easily detect u, and they assume that you’ll doing paid posts!