A few months back, Alex Bosworth asked a good question: with millions of active users, why was LinkedIn’s Alexa traffic graph so low?

I suggested in a comment that the issue might be LinkedIn’s exclusive use of SSL, where Alexa doesn’t track impressions. A few months later I noticed that the SSL had gone away, and LinkedIn’s Alexa traffic has gone from a dribble to a torrent:

I thought of this today as I read a pretty hyperbolic Hitwise headline: “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites“. By any reasonable definition of “MySpace”, “Yahoo”, and “internet site”, this just isn’t so. Jeremy Zawodny calls it “Apples and Oranges“. I’ll go with lies, damn lies, and web traffic statistics.

If you said Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, flickr, and digg (in that order), nice work.

The takeaway is that website traffic follows a power law distribution. The top 4 or so sites on the web do orders of magnitude more traffic than the next 40, who do orders of magnitude more traffic than the next 400, and so on. By just about any measure, Digg and flickr are enormously successful sites - but you wouldn’t know it if you took a quick look at a graph of them compared to MySpace. So next time you look at Alexa, remember, it’s all relative.

This is part two of my ‘Tale of the Tape’ series, a periodic look at Alexa stats that catch my eye.

I mentioned in my Tale of the Tape intro that it’s a bad idea to take Alexa stats out of context. Here’s a great reminder. I’m going to show you five sites’ Alexa reach plotted over a two year period. Three have a classic hockey-stick growth curve, one just in the last few months. Two don’t look so hot, nearly flat over this time period.

Your challenge: name these five sites.

To make things interesting, I’ve blanked out the Y-axis scale. But just so that we’re not too mean, here are a few clues:

1. If you’ve heard of one of these sites, you’ve almost certainly heard of all five. Household “Web 2.0″ names.
2. Sites one and two are among the top 20 sites on the web.
3. It’s all relative.

This is part one of my ‘Tale of the Tape’ series, a periodic look at Alexa stats that catch my eye.

Squidoo is just coming up on six months of being in the wild - first as part of a wide private beta, then as a public property opening its doors in December 2005. Squidoo gives individuals the power to publish ‘lenses’ on topics they’re passionate about using fast and easy publishing shortcuts. From Sudoku to Blackberry, the site has a huge range of members contributing lens content in the form of news, RSS feeds, Amazon listings, etc. Monitization from Google ads and Amazon Associate kickbacks are split by Squidoo and lensmasters, with options to offer proceeds to charities. Seth Godin is one of the founders (Chief Squid?) and has given Squidoo a monster shot of buzz.

After a big hop on launch day, Squidoo is now in the top ~5000 sites on the web with a reach of around 200-300 - solid traffic. But this graph is not the kind of up-and-to-the-right ramp that young web companies strive for. Three features of this graph catch my eye:

First, 2006 is flat.

Second, the spike-lull during beta looks a lot like the spike-lull after launch.

Third, holidays dampen momentum. I think Squidoo took a risk launching in December - unless you’re Amazon, the second half of the month is a black hole.

So what’s Squidoo to do? I’ll bet prognosticators will soon start blogging that a big strategy shift is in order, that Squidoo needs to see a big hockey stick growth graph or perish. Maybe turn Squidoo into a full blown wiki, add podcasting tools, or start giving away XBox 360s in exchange for giveaway-of-the-month traffic. Surely they’d do better if there was a Squidoo-branded AJAX home page?

The fact is that even with Seth Godin’s internet marketing oomph, growing a brand new service is hard. Worse still for all of the Web 2.0 dreamers out there, growth comes from unflagging attention to detail and ruthless execution. The chances of starting a novel site and achieving YouTubian growth are worse than the lottery.

So for my prediction: Squidooers are hard at work on the incremental improvements that can only be discovered from daily operation of the site and piles of user feedback. We’ll start to see changes before summer, and they won’t be radical departures from the site’s original purpose. Certainly more powerful tools for lensmasters, probably better methods for lensmasters and interested third parties to carry a more potent viral message, and search engine optimizations to build all-important pagerank and pull new members to the site. Since Squidoo focuses attention to drive an economic engine, maybe we’ll see affiliate-style reward system or other incentives outside the scope of a single lensmaster.

Squidoo has a lot of dials to turn, and I’m betting that small changes will yield big results. Time will tell, followed closely by Alexa graphs.

Update TechCrunch on the ‘Purple Albatross’: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/09/squidoo-seth-godins-purple-albatross/

Update 2 Seth Godin Responds: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/05/overnight_succe.html

I admit it - I’m addicted to Alexa. Through data gathered by their Internet Explorer toolbar, Alexa attempts to rank the popularity of web sites along various metrics. Tech pundits love to point to Alexa stats when drinking the Kool Aid of their web 2.0 site of the week - or calling for a site death watch. Two great recent examples are Digg vs. Slashdot and Flickr vs. Webshots. It’s a bit like sizing up boxers before a fight just by the numbers, genesis of the the famous saying “the tale of the tape”.

While many people argue that Alexa stats are crap, I think they’re valuable given you bear a few points in mind:

1. Don’t take Alexa out of context. Alexa has a narrow but deep window into web usage, i.e. extrapolating Windows IE users with Alexa toolbars out to a general web population. While they’ve got a great volume of data to play with (especially if they leverage Amazon’s usage numbers), don’t assume Alexa’s numbers reflect reality. On the other hand, it is quite reasonable to compare two sites’ Alexa ranks over the medium to long-term if they have a similar focus, audience demographic, international footprint, etc.
2. Until a site reaches a certain traffic level (rank over 40,000?), Alexa just doesn’t have enough data to be accurate. One user can skew stats at this level.
3. Obsessing daily over your own site rank is useless. I’ve seen Wikispaces stats fluctuate wildly on a daily and weekly basis when our internal numbers show nothing of the sort. Watch for long term trends instead.
4. Never confuse a site’s Alexa rank with its chances of business success. Much like the diameter of a heavyweight fighter’s bicep isn’t a great indicator of who will win the fight, Alexa’s tale of the tape says absolutely nothing about a site’s actual value to its users.

With these points in mind, I’ll periodically post Alexa-isms that catch my eye. First up: Squidoo’s first six months.