I live in a bizarro traffic building world where the web activity of the 18-30 year old male demographic determines billions of dollars of purchasing and marketing decisions of a couple hundred crusty, old, outdated white guys. Welcome to business media.
Here’s 3 powerful Alexa images for any of you trying to build a tech media or business media audience. Yes, it’s Alexa, but Alexa’s user sample is probably the most aligned to tech or business media than any other assessment out there (conversely, it’s a piss poor assessment of traffic patterns for stuff like real estate, feminine hygiene products, or stuff Oprah recommends).
The Tier One social media and networking sites for business/tech media are defined as:
Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Slashdot, Del.icio.us
December social media traffic patterns.
Nothing too crazy here, but it’s interesting to see the effects of the Holidays on social media traffic. The “eve’s” of Christmas and New Year’s are slower than the actual holidays. Digg is kicking the shit out of everyone (you’ll see this is a reoccuring theme).
Next, we look at the trailing 3 months:
We start to see that evidence that social media has actually plateaued. October and November were flat. December’s decline was due to the Holidays. Digg is kicking the shit out of everyone else.
So, let’s step waaay back and look at the trailing twelve months:
First of all, let’s go ahead and stop any discussion of Netscape.com’s Digg cloning being a success. They’ve lost nearly half their traffic. A year ago, the netscape.com domain was killing the other four. Then, around tax day (April 15th, for the foreign readers), you see Digg, Del.icio.us, and Slashdot go nuts. Not exactly sure why, but whatever that phenomenon was, everyone but Netscape got to participate in it.
While Digg is the clear winner, Del.icio.us and Reddit have also done very well over the last year in growing their traffic (a doubling or so for both). Netscape is bleeding out. Slashdot, more or less, has the same traffic as a year ago, but down substantially from its highs.
Getting Dugg is the new “getting Slashdotted”. That said, I’ll take a Slashdotting anytime. It’s of a much better quality of traffic and produces more quality links.
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Jason Calacanis has actually explained this fairly recently when Nick Denton made a big thing about that drop in traffic.
Aol decided to move their email clients hosted under Netscape.com over to the AOL domain, so they lost half of their traffic to that domain overnight.
I think the big boost in Alexa was due to someone on Digg encouraging Diggers to get the Alexa toolbar.
At the time Jason provided some different figures that showed a trend that was at least level and inclined to growth. This was around the time he left Netscape.
I’ve seen the big jump on other sites tracked - not sure what it is, but my impression has been it’s due to Alexa calculating data differently, rather than certain sites suddenly having a surge in traffic.
2c.
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The problem with basing any conclusions on Alexa stats is that Alexa is so pathetically off that it makes your conclusions meaningless. In my small experience, Alexa stats are off by at least a factor of 50. Meaning, that a site with similar Alexa rankings can easily have 50 times the traffic. If Digg users are even 1% more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than Netscape users, then Alexa would wrongly show Digg as having more traffic. The only thing these stats shows for certain is that more Digg users have Alexa installed than any of the other site’s users.
BP: Peter, I don’t think anyone is going to use the word accurate and Alexa in the same sentence with a straight face. However, Alexa is a halfway decent buzz meter for the more popular sites on the Internet and you can make interesting assessments using it relative to itself. When you start to think of the demographic that has the best chance of installing Alexa’s sampling tools, it’s hard to beat the the young, tech social media audience. There’s also pretty significant Comscore and Nielsen data to support the market share of each of these social sites, so it’s not like paying the $30,000 a year for the better numbers changes this outcome. Thanks for the comment.
Completely accurate of not still make quite interesting reading. What interests me is the way digg seems to have succeded slashdot, does this mean there might be a similar pattern with a new site overtaking digg and a drop in traffic down to the core audience?