Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Are Your Favorite Sites Global Faves Too?

Curious to see how your blog, favorite social network, media source, or company website stacks up in today's growing Internet space? These are two great resources to learn how much traffic the Internet's leading websites (and in fact almost all websites) are garnering.

www.alexa.com

The gold standard of online traffic data. Alexa developed a proprietary ranking system averaging Reach and monthly Page Views - this means a site's rank reflects 1) number of users and 2) number of pages viewed. Read the full explanation: (Alexa Traffic Ranking Definition).

It's got a great feature where you can plot the growth trend for multiple sites to see how they compare to each other. (Notice how I say "growth trend" as opposed to "trend" w/o hesitation. I'd be interested to see some hard data on how many websites/ebusinesses are truly in a "mature" stage of their life cycle. My guess - not many.)

http://www.quantcast.com/

Quantcast uses a much friendlier user interface (in my humble, non IT-background opinion). My favorite feature is the clearly stated Unique Visitor and Unique Page View count, which Alexa does not display in its rankings. Plus, Quantcast's Top 100 U.S. sites provides an interesting 1-line demographic snapshot of the featured sites (Top 100 U.S. sites).

You can also "Quantify" your site/blog by becoming a member, enabling you to view detailed reports of your site's traffic. Of the top 100 sites in the U.S., 7 of them have already done so. I can't vouch for the service b/c I don't use it - my guess is Google Analytics still takes the cake in this arena.

Plus, I just subscribed to Quantify's blog. 90% of the posts are featurettes highlighting a "new addition" to the Quantify family. It's a great way to find some great new sites you might be interested in (although StumbleUpon's definitely a more efficient method to serve this purpose). A couple of recent discoveries:

ICanHasCheezburger.com--- My gut is telling me this site makes (MUCH) more $$ than it should. If that's the case, I can only say one thing (equal to the sentiment I have towards country singers) - good for them.

HairFinder.com
--- Ditto above. It's really just a facade site driving traffic to Amazon book sales.
And they get 1.3MM global uniques / month!!! Oh affiliate Marketing, how I love thee!

1 comments:

Fortune Park Hotels Ltd - Best chain of business & leisure budget hotels India said...

Alexa ranking has its own significance in the ranking position of website in the search engines. The ranking in Alexa.com serves as a criteria for the Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If one depends on link or site selling as a form of monetization one will definitely want to increase their Alexa rank because it’ll increase bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing. Here we are taking into account the ranking of Social media. Social media is an Internet media that allow people to interact in some way. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet Forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. The basic services provided by these sites are interactive connections. The 10 social media sites stated below are ranked high in Alexa.com. These are:-

1. Yahoo
2. Microsoft Network
3. Google
4. You tube
5. MySpace
6. Orkut
7. Facebook
8. Hi5
9. Blogger.com
10.Friendster

Like Orkut.com is the online social networking services operated by Google. Here people come into contact with each other and build up relations whether personal or business.