27/04/07 Update from Dag: Woo-hoo look at us!




Thanks everyone for installing the FF extension or Alexa toolbar. You wouldn't think that a system that can be so easily manipulated by a dedicated community would hold much sway over advertisers - but it does, it surely does. Thanks again everyone! - Dag

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Every once in a while we ask you guys to help us out in some way, like the survey last month, and today I'd like to ask you guys to help us out once more. We try not to talk about the fact that VideoSift is increasingly expensive to run, but unfortunately as our site traffic increases the amount of time the site demands increases as well. We have offset this to a certain extent through our truly excellent charter members, (*cough* sign up here *cough*) as well as with some advertising, but in recent months our advertising returns have been dropping despite booming traffic.


We've managed to track this decline to our Alexa ranking. The less technically oriented users in the community might not be aware of what exactly Alexa is, but it is basically an independent metric for gauging a sites traffic. Why this is relevant is that many advertisers use this as a means of determining a site's popularity. It is based on the statistical assumption that a relatively small number of contributors are capable of accurately predicting the habits of a larger sample, it's sort of like Nielson ratings for television only it's for the internet. The problem for us is that a vast majority of our users are FireFox users and there is no officially sanctioned plugin for Alexa available on FireFox. What we believe has been compounding our problem is the transition from IE 6 to IE 7. In IE 6 users who had the amazon toolbar installed were contributing to Alexa data, however many of these users may not have reinstalled the toolbar after switching to IE 7.


At any rate as you can see from this graph our Alexa rankings have been dropping steadily for the last several months. The three of us, like many of you, are stats junkies, and we have been eying this drop off with a marked amount of anxiety. After having our best month ever last month, over 2 million page views, we were dismayed to see that we had fallen still further in the Alexa ranks.


This dear sifters is where you come in, if you would please be ever so kind as to install this plugin for FireFox or this one for IE you would be doing us a great favor. It will require that you restart your browser after installing it, but after that you can forget you have it. Just continue sifting as normal and feel confident that you are helping to support a site that you compulsively hit refresh on.


Also if you happen to be using firefox, which you should be, the plugin provides quick access to alexa and google page ranks in the top left. This is a good way of instantly judging the popularity and "credibility" of any site on the internet. The image below shows you an example of how the plugin looks.




It is also worth noting that the submissions are completely anonymous and that no user information is recorded so it will not impact your privacy. Furthermore the packet of data being sent and retrieved from alexa is too small to negatively impact your web experience.