Dembot: The Death of Alexa's Toolbar

+ The Death of Alexa's Toolbar

What do each of these graphs have in common? It appears that they all show a decline in people who use the Alexa Toolbar.

digg:

I still have never met an Alexa toolbar user. Do you know of one?

Rocketboom was static for awhile and has been on a steady upward incline all year. Why is Alexa showing a sharp downward trend?

I just spent about an hour searching the net on Alexa and all I could find were stories of people telling others to instal the toolbar so they could increase their own ranking. I did find that Vista considers Alexa malware and there is no planned support for Firefox or Safari.

Technorati is based on actual links:

Posted to internet_culture by Drew on May 31, 2007 1:38 AM

Comments:

+ Charles Iliya Krempeaux

I only know of one person who installed it. But he installed it only because he thought he could increase his site's ranking by doing so.

The Alexa Toolbar is spyware... I don't think people who understand that are going to install it.

-- Charles Iliya Krempeaux

Posted: May 31, 2007 11:04 AM

+ Michael Meiser

You may be right, but then why has mefeedia.com been rising over the same period. ;)

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?range=6m&url=mefeedia.com

I say this playing the devils advocate. Quite frankly anyone who discredits Alexa is a friend of mine. :)

It's viability is not just seriously questionable, it's more or less just and rudimentary indicator which is only relevant because there isn't anything that's public that's better.

If google would publish their stats that would be a good indicator, scary in fact. But maybe we don't want anything that accurate.

You should check out quantcast.com. I've taken to pointing people to them.

http://quantcast.com/

p.s. Is alexa still 100% based off users with their toolbar installed? That's crap. I thought they'd found a better way to track hits by now. I'd trust technoratti more.

The only people who are going to install the alexa toolbar is quite frankly a weird subset of newbies. Certainly the most educated and knowlegeable types that frequent "web2.0" sites are not likely to be using it. It's not even available for firefox is it? That's something like 30% of our traffic.

Down with alexa. The only reason it's even relevent is there's no competition. Maybe some startup should set out to create an "alexa killer". I'd invest my 2 cents in that. ;)

Posted: June 5, 2007 12:49 AM

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