Apr
23
Filed under: Asides | April 23rd, 2007

Alexa Walled Garden

Access to Alexa Traffic Graphs via undocumented APIs will be closed within the next few weeks. Lame lame lame — an image tag is not an undocumented API. Recommended replacements: Quantcast, Compete.

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11 Responses

  • Glen | April 23rd, 2007 @ 11:07 pm | Reply

    Yeah, Amazon is systematically shooting themselves in the foot with how they’re managing Alexa as of late. I’m definitely pulling for quantcast and compete.

  • Gerard McGarry | April 24th, 2007 @ 12:45 pm | Reply

    Considering there’s a widely recognized skew in their data, I don’t understand why they’re making their system even less accessible. I don’t use Alexa anyway, so I’m not too bothered if they screw themselves out of existence.

  • Vasken | April 24th, 2007 @ 5:50 pm | Reply

    If I’m correct, you need the Alexa toolbar installed to even report data to Alexa, right? So, by definition, it only reports the surfing habits of people who can’t keep toolbars out of their browsers (no offense intended to anyone dutifully running Alexa as a knowledgeable user in order to un-skew the data).

  • kyte | April 24th, 2007 @ 7:10 pm | Reply

    I think I’ll still rely on my server logs. Alexa is rubbish, and both Quantcast and Compete only measure US traffic. My site is in Australia, and although I get most of my traffic from the US, I still want other countries included in any measure.

  • Noah Slater | April 25th, 2007 @ 6:00 am | Reply

    That comment from LcF is clearly spam.

  • Gregory | April 26th, 2007 @ 12:35 pm | Reply

    The trouble with those two other services is that they.. well.. suck. Sadly Alexa is the largest, and while their data isn’t great – it’s certainly better than those other two.

    Browser tool bars aren’t a good way of tracking data now, they really never were – I’ve never met anyone with the Alexa Toolbar installed for example.

    Now if Google did this… it might mean something. Why they aren’t I don’t know – it’s a perfectly logical addition to their product line…

  • Gregory | April 26th, 2007 @ 1:20 pm | Reply

    Also – The two you listed only track US data, which is a complete deal breaker for me, sadly.

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