Flashes of Panic

When we were first writing the business plan, in January, I spent some time researching traffic numbers for various websites. These numbers generally aren’t widely available, so the next-best option is to work with Alexa, Amazon’s traffic-monitoring service.

In the course of this, I looked in to how Alexa measures traffic to various websites. The principal route seems to be by asking volunteers to install a browser toolbar or plug-in which then phones home to Alexa with your browsing data. Alexa then assumes that the users reporting their traffic are a representative sample of the whole population of internet users (which is, in the circumstances, one of the only reasonable approaches to take.)

This is effective enough when it comes to ranking the top 10,000 or so websites. However, once you get far enough down the scale, one user can have a disproportionately large effect on the overall ranking. This site, for example, was unranked for the first three years of its existence. Since I installed the Alexa plug-in, however, it has jumped to #547,291—an “improvement” of 750%.

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