Alexa officially joins the dark side of the Force. The supposedly objective provider of website traffic analytics announced a new method of calculating rankings and suddenly conservative website rankings are plummeting while liberal pro-government websites are skyrocketing. Even MSNBC’s Alexa rank is rising… which tells you all you need to know.
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So, Alexa is holding the equivalent of a Star Wars light saber, just a broken off flashlight handle with a battery in it; all flash and no slash...
[edit] F-em, I used to trust them too.
This is really easy to fix. I just turned my monitor upside down.
I'm a web developer... and all I can say is that this is *Super* shady.
Based on Alexa's own blog post (to which this article links): "We also gather much of our traffic data from direct sources, including sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script and certify their metrics."
Alexa gathers their data from people who have extensions or plugins in their browser, and apparently also those who have Alexa's own custom script on their site. No big deal, this is how a lot of analytics is acquired.
the ONLY way that I can figure that Alexa can make this case is that, for some reason, "certify their metrics" has special meaning. Where all the liberal sites got wind of the need to "certify their metrics" and the conservative ones didn't get the memo. Otherwise... I can't find __any__ way that this works.
Yeah, and the fact that just a few days ago there were news stories about MSNBC viewership being almost non-existent, to read that MSNBC's website ranking is improving makes Alexa look silly.
Actually, MSLSD might have picked up 6 viewers due to the curiosity factor over the story, and therefore their ratings skyrocketed.
Maybe they also found a way to count flipping through the channels as viewership.
yeah... I read in to this as much as I could. I can find zero reasonable method by which this happened.
So, yeah, it just lowers my views of Alexa, and I'm going to make sure others in the web dev community know about this.
Just in time for the next big presidential election season. This is what happens when citizen warriors try to demand accurate voting procedures, the snakes attack from a different direction.
Lies, Damn lies and statistics......
It looks like they've put Michael Mann in charge of concocting their graphs.
Soros is demanding more for his money.
Wouldn't he want honest numbers? So he could see how effective the money he spent really was. At least in private?
No, all he cares about is the propaganda that is being fed to the LIVs. They are where he gets his feeling of superiority.