A Request for a Helping Hand
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.
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
--------
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.
39 Comments
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
I actually really like the FF plugin, it's a nice unobtrusive way to get Alexa stats on a site I'm visiting without actually having the pain of going to Alexa.
I was a big fan of Alexaholic (now statsaholic) but it's been crippled by Alexa for being too successful of a mash-up. :-(
choggieHey, I did it, but got no indication its there, I don't trust you two, and will never logon to videosift again!!
dotdudeUsing Firefox 2.0.0.3 on my Power Mac G5, the "context for menu opotions" symbol, PageRank and Alexa show up on the lower right bar of my window between my "Video Downloader" and "Web Comments." The word VideoSift doesn't show.
James Roedotdude, you can move them around. I think dag just placed his there manually. On my laptop they are in the bottom right too.
Choggie, for FF or IE?
also thanks people.
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
The VideoSift part is actually just a bookmark on my Browser toolbar.
choggieFirefox, James.....Wait, bottom right.....
HistNerdDone and done. I swear, once I'm out of college (May) and have a steady job (July), I'm going charter. Until then, I hope this helps. *quality
siftbotGold Star member HistNerd has awarded James Roe one published post for this quality Sift Talk contribution.
deputydogDone
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
We've added an Alexa graph in the sidebar - so we can follow our progress. Top 1K, here we come.
plastiquemonkeyeven though it's not official, the firefox plugin adds to the stats?
fireflyDone, though I'm only running FF 1.5.0.11 (not 2.0) does that matter?
James Roeyeah, it just polls the alexa api, which apparently still affects their ratings. At least thats what the faq for the plugin says.
Firefly, yes.
grspecI installed this even though I think that alexa rankings are a pile of crap. I think that your web stats parsed with awstats should be more valuable when negotiating with advertisers. Too bad they think people with alexa toolbars installed represent the avg user.
loorisi agree with grspec: i installed it, but it's very dumb.
a better solution would be for google to provide analytics limited access to third parties, if you agree, so they can see *real* data.
winkler1for you guys..sure. done.
djsunkidyeah, totally done. I already had googlerank stats from my googlebar, but no prob for the alexa too.
djsunkidPS: When you gonna pony up the stats from sifty's poll, anyway?
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
Looris, a system like Alexa, but using the google toolbar is my dream. They are already reporting back to base, I can't imagine it would be that difficult for them to implement, and crush Alexa overnight.
James Roeyeah, they could also correlate the data with sites that use analytics in order to get some really good statistics. I could send you our chat logs of what we think about alexa, but it's not really fit for public consumption.
ravenI have done as requested, O Lords of the Sift!
mlxDone!
Farhad2000
swampgirlI'm late in, but done. Happy to help however we can
rembarCount me in.
aidosdon't s'pose there's one of these cursed alexa plugins for safari?
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
I wish aidos - Safari is my browser of choice too.
aidosoh well. I use FF at work so I'll just have to up the amount of time I spend on the sift during my working day to compensate
DeanoDonage! I run Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows. I now have Pagerank and Alexa in the top left hand corner.
Normally if someone asked me to install something called "Alexa" I'd be damn suspicious
choggieparty pooper.....homemade wine was a starter, mate....
James Roelol, I know, I am the big evil admin in the sky, but I have killed other sift talk posts for less. One has to be fair in their application of the rod.
looris@dag: it would still be a survey. instead, using analytics, would be "the real thing". Of course, google should decide to do that....
by the way i've noticed a bizarre behaviour: first time i restarted firefox the alexa extension worked fine, but after a reboot it disappeared O_o
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
Looris - QuantCast is a bit like what you describe. We recently signed up with them.
deputydogfucking hell that was a quick boost huh?
Farhad2000Alexa pwned. But then again all the sift addicts did sign up
looris@dag: hey that's intresting, i'd use it too
Farhad2000So what are we jacking next? LOL
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
Front page of New York Times?
MINKerm... alexa sucks?
donkey balls?
the reason companies use the (useless) data is because they WANT TO BELIEVE!!!
they need stats so bad they will take anything numerical, regardless of methodology.
seems like you fell into the same trap.
i understand the problems with advertising revenue... but that's a problem of the whole web2.0 traffic-related "eyeballs" bullshit.
it'll never last i tell ya! thanks for all the hard work, but no i won't be sending data about every site i visit to yet another centralised robotic datacrunching nightmare machine, thankyou very much.
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