There are some fringe benefits to being a part of the HMTK community. Some are more tangible than others but, they are all good.
There are several ways to become a member of my fast growing community. One of the easiest ways is to leave comments on the blog. If you look to the right, over in the sidebar, you will see that I run the top commentator plugin. This provides a PR5 link back to your blog.
You can also join my MyBlogLog community. You don't get the benefit of a link-back but you do get noticed by me.
Thirdly you can add me as a favorite in your Technorati profile.
So, what are the fringe benefits?
- I have one web browser with the Alexa toolbar. Once a day I use it to visit the sites of my advertisers and top commentators. Increasing your Alexa ranking can be hard, I make it easier for you.
- When I do a speed linking post I always link to a few articles from my community. Since I do not delete posts you will earn a perpetual deep link from me.
- I run contests and give you free stuff.
So become an active member here on the blog and enjoy your fringe benefits!
With the rise in on line advertising and sites such as Pay-Per-Post and ReviewMe a lot of weight is being given to Alexa rankings. The problem is that even Alexa warns it's users that it's rankings are not very accurate as they only count people who use their toolbar.
What's a web entrepreneur to do?
Thankfully Alexa does not just track your global Alexa ranking, they also track your rankings by country. This is a significant boon for all involved (or at least those who take Alexa rankings seriously) as it allows you to better understand the reach a web site has.
Let's take my website, hmtk.com, for example.
Currently my Alexa ranking is 225,184. It is not in the top 100K world-wide but, I am in the top 100K in eight countries:
Hmtk.com traffic rank in other countries:
Slovenia 24,517
Canada 32,731
United States 45,422
Peru 68,158
Finland 74,135
Croatia 78,764
Romania 93,810
Japan 95,413
Wow, those crazy Slovenians, they just LOVE me!
What this means to advertisers is that if they want to get hung up on Alexa rankings then they should do a little bit of extra work and find out which sites are popular in the market they are trying to tap. Just because a site is over 200K in the world does not mean it is not under 30K in your target market.
One problem many people are begining to face is that of Alexa. Alexa is not exactly the problem itself, the problem is that many advertisers will look at your Alexa rating and make a judgement based on it.
The problem with Alexa is that it only tracks information gathered from people who use the Alexa toolbar with Internet Explorer.
Most of my traffic comes from people who use FireFox. These hits will never be counted by Alexa, or will they?
If you look at the traffic details for hmtk.com You will see one huge spike in the beginning followed by a shorter spike. These are the result of my blog being 'dugg'. My 3 month average has been hovering about 225K and you can see that my traffic is fairly steady.
My traffic is not earth-shattering but it is steady and you would think an advertiser would like steady traffic rather than tall peaks and low valleys. Sadly, they look at the Alexa ranking (225K) and that is all they see.
Also, this blog is Page Rank 5 according to Google. Google must know something Alexa does not?
I would also like to cast your eyes on this:
The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. Known biases include (but are likely not limited to) the following:
Our users are disproportionately likely to visit sites that are featured on alexa.com such as amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be overcounted.
The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of the various browsers is unknown. Alexa's sample includes users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla browsers. The AOL/Netscape and Opera browser is not supported, which means that sites operated by these companies may be undercounted.
The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of various operating systems is unknown. Alexa sample includes toolbars built for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely due to advertising locality, language, and other geographic and cultural factors. For example, to some extent the prominence of Chinese sites among our top-ranked sites reflects known high rates of general Internet usage in China, but there may also be a disproportionate number of Chinese Alexa users.
In some cases traffic data may also be adversely affected by our "site" definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the "same" content may be incorrect and/or out-of-date. Similarly, the determinations of domains and home pages may not always be accurate. When these determinations change (as they do periodically), there may be sudden artificial changes in the Alexa traffic rankings for some sites as a consequence.
The Alexa Toolbar turns itself off on secure pages (https:). Sites with secure page views will be under-represented in the Alexa traffic data.
Source - Alexa Disclaimer
You might be begining to wonder what this has to do with the title of this post. Fear not for I will now tell you how to make Alexa like you.
If someone does not have the Alexa toolbar installed there is still a way to make the hits on your site count by using a redirect.
http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://www.hmtk.com/
If you create a link to your site with the above redirect code the visit will be counted by Alexa. It will not, however, be counted by Google when figuring page rank.
So, which do you want? A better Google Page Rank or a better Alexa rating?
UPDATE: After running this for a little over two months (and some nefarious versions of it) I have come to the conclussion that this is no way helps you. Just going to your own site from three different Alexa enabled computers (or changing your dynamic IP address often) gives you far more benefit than this does.
If you want to help me increase my Alexa rating click this link -> HMTK.com deserves a better Alexa rating
Word on the web is that News Corp is in talks to purchase Digg for $150M
Digg has been in talks about acquisition with several companies, News Corp is just one of them. Rumors say negotiations have not been able to settle on a number higher then $150M so Digg may instead go into a second round of financing with it's backers.
Controversy is partly based on Diggs claim of 20 million unique monthly visitors and a high rate of growth, whereas the data from Comscore shows only 1.3M uniques and flat growth since April.
According to Alexa Digg is ranked as the 89th most visited site on the web. We all know YouTube was recently acquired by Google for $1.5B but they are ranked the number 9 site on the web. Also, as seen in the graph below, Youtube is still in growth mode while Digg has clearly flatened out.
NewsCorp *did* recently purchase the social bookmarking website MySpace for $580M but that property has been climbing in value ever since it was purchased. Some might even argue that Rupert Murdoch had no idea what he was buying when he bought it. When compared to the recent purchase of YouTube you can't say he didn't get a great deal though.
So, at this time Digg is *NOT* being purchased by News Corp. Though we do not know what offers were on the table, we do know they fell short of Digg's $150M price tag. But, is Digg worth $150M?
When comparing the value of Internet deals it's good to have something to compare them too.
The above data comes from http://snapshot.compete.com/digg.com
What we can clearly see is that Digg is not worth nearly what YouTube and Myspace are worth. To make matters worse Digg does not have the retention ability the other sites have.
Even Google, which is ostensibly a search site, holds people longer then Digg does!
There is no denying that Digg is a hot Internet property.
At the same time, not too long ago, a Digger did an online survey of Diggers and found that a vast majority of them use ad-blocking software.
The News Corp purchase of MySpace has seen tremendous growth but, how large of a portion of MySpace users block advertising? Since Digg's only source of revenue *IS* advertising dollars one would have to imagine that the high use of ad-blocking software among it's membership must be a contributing factor in keeping it's potential acquisition price low.
Unlike MySpace, Digg is about sending people to other websites. Myspace is built on the idea of getting a visitor to come to MySpace and set up shop. They then get their friends to do the same. What ends up happening is you've built a virtual neighborhood on line and you need never leave the confines of MySpace.
Digg is the exact opposite of that. Digg is built on linking out and away from Digg. The Digg user experience is more along the lines of; visit, open links in new browser tabs, leave digg and read stories.
Yes, Digg users do return throughout the day to find more stories to read but the site is not built to *capture* it's audience. Where MySpace is a net, designed to keep people in, Digg is the trampoline, designed to bounce people away.
Of further concern is the high number of liberals who use Digg as opposed to Conservatives (the proclaimed market of FOX News, owned my News Corp.) How much of that left-leaning base will stay with Digg if it were to be purchased by News Corp?
The bigger question may be, "who would benefit from buying Digg?"
#1 - Google - They would probably get the most benefit out of purchasing Digg. Why? Becuase Digg is essentially just a news Agregator with peer review thrown in. The only 'original' content on Digg has to be the user comments attached to stories.
#2 - Yahoo! - Though they would not benefit as much as Google might, it would be another trophy to put on the mantle alongside flickr and de.lici.us. Yahoo does not *need* Digg but, as everyone knows in big business, "Just because you don't need something doesn't mean you can't gain by keeping others from owning it."
#3 - MicroSoft - Well... that one is a bit iffy given Digg's left leaning, pro-Linux/Mac anti-Ms membership base. They could benefit from the technology aspect but I don't think they would retain much of what *is* Digg after a purchase.
About Alexa:
I know some people will say, "Alexa? Those statistics are wothless. They only track hits by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed." I have two counterpoints to that argument:
1) Look at the top 10 websites according to Alexa. Is there a single one in the top ten that you feel does not belong there?
2) I do not have hard numbers to back this up but... We know most Diggers block ads, what about Alexa users? If the background numbers on Alexa users show them to be less tech savy and not ad-blockers then it stands to reason that the information Alexa provides *would* carry far more weight to a buyer of Internet companies.
This article was written based on information gathered from:
Seeking Alpha
Techcrunch
UPDATE
A reader just pointed me to this link from a year ago which contains an interview with Kevin Rose about the future of Digg.
A key point is that there has only been one round of VC fundraising for Digg, to the tune of $2.8 million. so, an asking price of $150M would be a return on invesment of roughly 53 to 1!!!
Now, Kevin rose does still own at least 30% of the company and I'm going to assume that the VC funders only acquired a small stake in Digg for their money. Which begs the question, "Who is setting the price?"
I'm willing to bet that Digg is under the same delusion that affected friendster. Their VC backers are probably looking at the $150M and seeing that only about $50M of that will go to them which puts them below a 20 to 1 pay-off on their investment.
If you remember from early episodes of Diggnation, when Kevin Rose talked about the VC fundraising, Kevin did state that it was a hard sell getting only $2.8M because the VC folks wanted to give over $10M and take majority ownership. Kevin and Jay had to fight to get a smaller investment and likewise they kept a larger share of the ownership.
My advice to Kevin and Jay? Take $100M. You will each end up with a very nice chunk of change and you won't fall victum to the friendster disease.
