Ron Hornbaker

I made some changes on Statsaholic today, adding Compete and Quantcast graphs (two very cool companies, who have generously given me permission to hotlink their graph images). It’s nice to see both graphs side-by-side:

The two companies use slightly different representations of data on their respective graphs–Compete shows monthly unique visitors on the Y axis, while Quantcast shows daily uniques. They differ also in the color scheme, unfortunately, with Compete using blue, red and green for the first, second and third domain, and Quantcast using blue, green and red. It’d be nice to have some config options for these items, but the comparisons are still useful I think.

If a domain is a “quantified publisher” on Quantcast, you’ll see a breakdown of U.S. and Global traffic on the Quantcast chart, and you can trust those numbers more since they’re a direct measurement of site traffic. Otherwise, Quantcast numbers are U.S. only.

Statsaholic still gets crazy traffic, currently over 1 million page views from 550,000 uniques/month and rising. Funny how little hobby sites can just take off.

Thanks to a conference blog post by David Berkowitz, I now have a pretty good idea what Jeff Bezos thinks about the Alexaholic/Statsaholic situation. (more…)

Om writes:

A lot of good things happened, innovation blossomed, but now we are entering a more pragmatic phase, where the large players like Google and Amazon who distributed the API elixir are taking control back.

Google My Maps is a case in point, where the company is competing with its “users.” Don’t worry – it won’t be the last time you will see Mountain View adopt tactics that in the past were associated with Microsoft. Keeping that $145 billion market capitalization intact is a bitch!

Google is not alone, as one of my readers points out. Michael Arrington has been following the feud between Amazon-owned Alexa.com and Alexaholic (or whatever it is being called this week.) In the end Alexaholic/Statsaholic features ended up becoming part of Alexa.com offering. Why let a little seemingly parasitic service live if you can make ad dollars off those page views?

See the full article at Web 2.0: End of Innocence. This whole ordeal certainly has erased whatever innocence I had about mashups, APIs, and the seemingly benign nature of large web companies.

Statsaholic got covered by TechCrunch (again) this morning, and as usual, the comments are fun to follow. Take this one, for instance, by one of my idols in the tech world:

Paul Graham
March 30th, 2007 at 9:10 am
I think it’s time for Alexa to die. Their data was always dangerously misleading, and now they’re behaving evilly (in the Google sense) as well. If anyone wants to build a replacement for them, Y Combinator would be happy to fund it.

(more…)

[UPDATE - March 31: Alexa has modified their graph images so that if you turn off your referer headers as described here, you will see only the first domain in your list, even on their own site. This effectively prevents users who choose to conceal referers for privacy or any other reason from seeing the full functionality of their graphs. As more and more companies open up their systems to promote widespread use, Alexa seems to be doing all they can to close theirs down.]

It appears that Alexa has shut off their traffic graphs on all the websites of the world, with the exception of their own, Alexa.com. The sadly ironic part of this is that they’ve apparently broken their own widgets, too — all in an effort to shut down Statsaholic.

If you’re tired of seeing white boxes where the pretty graphs used to be, and you’d like to remedy the situation, all it takes is Firefox and a quick, easy, 10-second fix. Here’s what you do: (more…)

I guess I was wrong about Alexa… turns out they are willing to turn off their traffic graphs to the entire internet, with the exception of their own site. Statsaholic’s graphs disappeared a few minutes ago, around 6:00 pm Pacific, and no amount of referrer hacking will bring them back up. (more…)

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. (more…)