I decided to merge my thoughts on WebDate and Alexa into one post.
The Interview contains lot's of talk about mobile dating and the future of Webdate. Let me tell you about the mobile dating. Nobody is doing it, yet. In iDate Miami we learned that mobile dating ranked #13 on consumers list of what they value most about a dating service. MatchMobile was never able to get much more than 100,000 paying customers If I remember correctly.
As for the future of WebDate, expect massive loss of members if/when they move to a paid model. Tiered or not, free and #5 doesn't mean much if all you're doing is earning revenue from banner ads. With all the spyware/malware out there, these rankings are useless and Hitwise better smarten up. (Ed:Looks like they did, read on for more about new HitWise ranking system).
Buying crappy traffic from toolbar vendors may inflate your numbers, but those people are usually not serious daters. Someone prove me wrong, please.
Webdate is the 20-something crowd, they don't pay and they have grown up as voyeurs, of course guys like checking out young women with video cams.
Markus has commented over at Online Personals Watch that HitWise is using a new filter which has dropped WebDate from #5 to 15th position.
The drop in rank shows just how much websites rely on low-quality pop-up and spybar traffic to inflate rankings.
Consumers don't care much about traffic numbers, they care about quality. I would like to see the referrer logs and the follow-on links for sites. Where did the traffic come from and where did it go?
If you get thousands of visitors that immediately turn away, should those visitors count towards your aggregated traffic rank?
I have to disagree that Alexa is as useful as Markus thinks it is. Relying on statistics gathered from toolbar installs in inherently flawed and inaccurate for a number of reasons.
A site like Corante caters to an internet demographic that probably doesn't have the Alexa toolbar installed. Many even have Javascript disabled. Then again, people who use free dating sites probably have a ton of toolbars and spyware installed.
A while back OPW or some other site wrote about Bebe.com, a "social networking" site (and I use that terms loosly) getting inordinate amounts of traffic. I looked at Alexa and found this:
Bebo.com gets approximately 6,000 per day, which works out to 180,000 visitors a month.
Bebo is ranked 613 on Alexa.
Corante receives much more unique visitors than 180k per month.
Corante.com is 10,968 on Alexa.
It's unfortunate that I can't measure my traffic apples-to-apples against the other blogs because the Corate link love and GoogleJuice is so tremendous. We have links that haven't been modified for over a year old that are the number one search result on Google.
Now let's look at Technorati. Technorati is a search engine which tracks weblogs as Google tracks web pages.
Google and Yahoo are fine for searches that focus on content which is not date-sensitive. Technorati adds new blog posts seconds after they are created. Much more immediate understanding about what's hot right now.
According to Technorati:
Bebo.com: 817 links from 633 websites (1.29 links per site)
Match.com has 673 links from 503 websites (1.33 links per site)
Yahoo Personals: 433 links from 220 websites (1.96 links per site)
Corante: 7,749 links from 4,057 websites(1.91 links per site)
What does this mean? Corante has much more link love than the other sites. People are talking about us a lot more than the other sites. This changes all the time, depending on press releases, media attention and getting Slashdotted (huge traffic spikes). It's fascinating to watch traffic spikes from media attention, the ensuingGooglejuice (high Google ranking) and then follow-on traffic from news aggregators. Keep in mind that tracking trackbacks on Technorati is leading-edge, and the demographics of the users are decidedly tech-heavy.
Go to Technorati.com yourself and compare your dating site with your competitors.
For those interested in these kinds of things, here is a anti-phishing toolbar from Netcraft.
1. meir on June 29, 2005 11:07 PM writes...
High traffic numbers only mean high bandwith bills.
But it is fun to see how much traffic your site has. ;0)
I suggest that you subscribe to all of the measuring services - Comscore, Nielson, Hitwise, and Alexa - and then post the results side by side.
By seeing all of them on the same page, it will give you an acurate idea who is consuming the most bandwith.
If you need $ to pay for these measuring tools, give me a call and I'd be happy to chip in.
Permalink to Comment2. Zbigniew Lukasiak on June 30, 2005 4:43 AM writes...
I believe you should count dodgeball as doing in fact mobile dating.
By the way I have a wikipage on mobile social software: http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/index.cgi?MobileSocialSoftware
Permalink to Comment3. xyz on June 30, 2005 9:38 AM writes...
Dave:
I don't think it serves your blog well to be pushing your users over to Mark's blog. I know you bloggers don't like to think of yourselves as competitors but the reality is you are. Given some of your recent posts, maybe I ought to just read Mark's blog since your just pushing me over there anyway.
Permalink to Comment4. Dave Evans on June 30, 2005 10:09 AM writes...
If all you read is OPW, you're interested in press announcements. For example, OPW lead story today is about the Comcast Dating Channel.
I wrote about that months ago. I tried it out and wrote about my experience, instead of linking to the press release.
I enjoy covering topics like open profiles, tagging, customer acquisition, conversion rates, identify management, customer service and search.
I've chosed not to post every single new article that comes across the wire. There is simply not enough time in the day to do otherwise. I've thought about in-lining Yahoo News filtered on dating, but you should see the results, all over the place, terrible signal-to-noice ratio.
I've surveyed readers and most read OPW, this blog and Userplane. The differences between each of us is quite clear, I've covered that here before.
You're free to read whatever you like and should have all of us in your newsreader.
Permalink to Comment5. mfrind@plentyoffish.com on June 30, 2005 11:06 AM writes...
Alexa is pretty accurate if your ranking is over 3k. At any rate hitwise estimates bebo's traffic at about 100k + visitors a day and using alexa i get a similar picture. When googling bebo i notice there is a lot of talk about spyware driving traffic to bebo, some ranking systems probably filter that.
If you think alexa is bad you should take a closer look at comscore. Comscore is a spyware install and the only people using it are those who have no clue how to uninstall it. It is very easy to detect and many industries (banking) are now forcing users to uninstall it before they allow access. Since the install base of comscore is so much smaller then alexa i force plentyoffish users to uninstall before they can use the site. Looking in comscore you can see that plentyoffish barely even ranks and isn't even in the dating category. Nielson netratings is also a spyware install and works the same way as comscore.
At any rate currently hitwise is the only ranking system that sort of works because the end user has no idea they are tracked. Hitwise uses ISP log files. If hitwise were to change the ranking system to track only users who got behind the login page then they would truely have the best ranking system.
Permalink to Comment6. Dave Evans on June 30, 2005 11:15 AM writes...
Check out the Netcraft anti-phishing toolbar. If it had spywear/toolbar de-install feature, that would be cool. "Clean up your act before you visit my site."
Permalink to Commenthttp://toolbar.netcraft.com/