Ron Hornbaker

First, the back story: I created Alexaholic.com (now Statsaholic.com - more on that later) over a long weekend in February 2006 for my own selfish purposes: I found the Alexa.com website to be slow and clunky, and I wanted faster access to their excellent traffic graphs.

I had seen their graph images hotlinked around the web by hundreds of sites, so I went about playing with the urls and discovered they would allow the direct comparison of up to five domains (vs. two domains exposed by Alexa’s interface) and offered a smoothing parameter (not exposed by Alexa’s interface). I wrapped the graph images in a fast, lightweight DHTML interface, eliminated page reloads between graph reloads, and that was the basis for Alexaholic — a place for an Alexa traffic junkie (me) to get his fix.

As luck would have it, Alexaholic grew rapidly via organic blog mentions, and was soon reaching a sizable audience of webmasters, seo/sem specialists, marketers, and investors. About two months after launch, I got a voicemail from Geoffrey Mack, Product Manager at Alexa, requesting that I call him back. I dialed his number, expecting to hear the worst — they they were going to shut me down — so I was pleasantly surprised when Geoff instead expressed how much he and the team at Alexa liked Alexaholic. He had only a few requests involving backlinks to Alexa.com from the graphs on my site and my Chartlets that webmasters were embedding. The conversation was, on the whole, encouraging and flattering — Alexa liked what I had built, and was giving their tacit approval to Alexaholic. Shortly thereafter, Geoff complimented the Alexaholic interface on Alexa’s corporate blog.

Now, cut to present: In early March of this year, Alexa filed a UDRP complaint with ICANN to try to take the alexaholic.com domain away from me because it has their brand name, “alexa”, embedded within. In response, I changed the name of Alexaholic to Statsaholic, which better fits my plan to add data from other providers, anyway. Naively thinking that should be the end of the trouble, I discovered last week that my problems were only starting — Alexa started blocking their graphs from appearing on the Statsaholic website by sniffing the referer header as the requests hit their servers. Keep in mind that tens of thousands of other websites hotlink to Alexa traffic graphs, and that Alexa could shut them all off in one fell swoop if they really wanted to. It’s a trivial bit of coding. But I suspect they don’t (and won’t) do this because they realize that Alexa’s popularity is due in large part to letting those graphs be widely disseminated.

Key Question: Why hasn’t Alexa made the graphs part of their official API and charged per request? They’ve done it with their website thumbnail images, and with data, but why not with the graphs? I would be their FIRST CUSTOMER for such a service, as long as it was priced appropriately. I’m already paying them several hundred dollars each month for data, and would gladly pay for graphs. The fact that they haven’t charged for them, and allow any website in the world (except mine) to link to them, says to me that they only mind hotlinking if the hotlinker becomes successful. Which should give every Amazon/Alexa api developer pause for thought.

Lest the reader forgets, I’m going up against Amazon here, a $16 billion company with in-house attorneys, so I don’t expect this to go swimmingly. My only hope is to sway public opinion in my favor, and it swayed pretty far with last Friday’s digg. While virtually all bloggers covering this are stepping up in my favor, I’m being referred to as a “pirate” by the same guys at Alexa who complimented my service a few months ago, and who copied most of my interface ideas on Alexa.com.

In summary, all I’m asking for is a bit of fairness, and for the chance for Statsaholic to survive and continue displaying Alexa data. Traffic has held remarkably strong during the name change. I’ll soon be adding Compete and Quantcast data to Statsaholic, and it would be a shame if Alexa had to go away. I would urge Alexa to reconsider the walled garden they’re becoming before these more progressive-minded newcomers beat them at their own game. I still consider Alexa the gold-standard of free comparative web traffic data, and their historical footprint back to 2001 gives them a huge advantage over these other players in the space. I hope they don’t put that to waste by continuing down this path of running over the little guys who innovate and bring a wider audience to Alexa’s products.

A special thanks to the dozens of bloggers who spoke out on behalf of Alexaholic/Statsaholic. Thank you all so much, and please let me know if I’ve missed your post.

Update: As I was finishing this, I got an email letting me know that, once again, Alexa was blocking traffic graphs on Statsaholic. So, once again, I went and coded around the block. While I can keep this up for a long time (several kind souls donated hundreds of websites to use for the graph serving referers), I’d rather we could come to some kind of terms and stop the arms race.

Want to tell Alexa what you think? Here’s their contact page.

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