As many WUWT readers know, I have been using alexa.com for quite sometime to gauge the performance of WUWT. Reader “Pat” brought this recent strange disparity to my attention. When you see things like the Drudge report plummet and MSNBC soar, you know immediately that something isn’t right:
Those who run watchdog news websites are scratching their heads and trying to make sense of the latest data released by a California company that measures website traffic.
According to data for July through September, almost every major website – from WND to the Drudge Report and Breitbart – saw its rankings drop on Alexa.com while pro-government sites mostly went up.
Source: WND
The claim seems to be true when you look at Alexa’s publicly reported traffic graphs. Here’s the Drudge Report according to Alexa:
(Lower numbers are better, for example, Google is #1)
![drudge[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/drudge1.jpg?quality=83)
And here is MSNBC according to Alexa:
I find that hard to believe. I find this even harder to believe, Fox News according to Alexa:
![Alexa_Fox[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/alexa_fox1.jpg?quality=83)
And the Soros driven Center for American Progress, aka thinkprogress.org according to Alexa
The exception to that knee up for left leaning websites starting in September is CNN.com according to Alexa:
So, this may be some sort of reporting or tracking goof. But, the oddity does not stop there.
Now, look at WUWT compared to the eco-news website “Grist”, which we long ago surpassed.
First, here is WUWT according to Alexa. Note the same “knee” in the graph as seen on the Drudgereport earlier:
And here is grist.org according to Alexa. Same “knee”, opposite direction:
Hmmm.
My internal wordpress.com counter for WUWT shows that WUWT had its best month ever in total views, nearly 5 million:
And, WUWT’s best ever day in its seven year history was in September 2014:
Something is broken at Alexa that seems to favor one sort of website over another. What’s up with that?
It may have to do with this recent “upgrade” at Alexa that explains a new method of calculating its rankings based on what it says is a wider panel of viewers.
“We’re excited to announce that after a lot of hard work, the size of Alexa’s global traffic panel will be significantly increasing,” writes Leigh Katcher in the blog. “Over the next month we’ll be incorporating lots of new data points, which will help improve the accuracy of our metrics. As a reminder, our data panel is a sample of global Internet traffic used to calculate Alexa ranks and estimate non-Certified metrics.”
The blog posting continued, “With better data, we’ll be able to offer deeper insights into your site, your competitors’ site and overall traffic strategy. One immediate result of the additional data is that you may see your traffic rank fluctuate, especially for sites ranked greater than 100,000.”
One wonders how such an “upgrade” can affect one type of site more than others. In the WND article, they say the disparity even extends to things like Planned Parenthood versus Lifenews, two sites that offer politically opposing viewpoints.
Did Alexa get a grant or sponsorship? Perhaps a word from the big O’s office to be more positive towards climate change. Maybe an award pending from his office if Alexa co-operates? In Australia when the previous warmist government was in office nearly every media body, academic institution, ” independent advisory body” was pressured or corrupted via funding stream, selective appointments and in some cases sackings. Nothing left untouched I’m afraid.Thankfully Mr Murdoch doesn’t respond well to being bullied so his publications maintained some independence on the climate issue and he won additional readers whilst the leftist drones lost ground as people woke-up to the scam.
actually i think Mr. Murdoch does respond to bullying. I think i heard rumblings last year to the effect that Mr Murdoch would be arrested if he returned to the U.S. Was this a joke or perhaps i heard incorrectly?
What i’m sure i did hear was Mr Murdoch saying something to the effect of “the King has been mighty restrained with his illegal orders of late, best for Congress to give him what he wants (amnesty) without him having to ask for it”
What if WUWT etc stayed same but bots cranked up everything else?
What am I missing here? the note above the Drudge Report graph -copied here-“(Lower numbers are better, for example, Google is #1)” clearly states graphs are “upside down” to normal with ordinate numbers getting larger as they approach the horizontal axis. So in all the plots the Drudge Report, WUWT etc. thus show a large jump in readership and the lefties show a decline.
I know what this is. The new fad in data graphing is to use it upsidedown.
We must hide the decline!
Alexa statistics are absolutely worthless and can be manufactured at will. They only track people foolish enough to install their Toolbar which does not have to be human. I was thinking about setting up some Alexa rank spam servers to make my point as this nonsense never goes away.
Meh… I trust Breitbart for news as much as I trust Al Gore on climate change. When a “news” organization makes up stories like “Friends of Hamas” it really isn’t a news organization.
Isn’t Alexa rankings based on a toolbar installed by users? Is so, it is possible that a group had an organized effort to install this toolbar and move the ratings. How much did Skeptical Science move?
I think they got mike mann to draw their graphs.
an update at WND:
15 Oct: WND: Leo Hohmann: Caught ‘red-handed’: News-site deception uncovered
‘This is the smoking gun. This is huge’
Statistically, it would seem to be impossible.
How could every major alternative website that challenges the mainstream, establishment view of Washington and the world be experiencing a drop-off in readership while their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are gaining readers? …
The Drudge Report, WND, Breitbart, Fox News, the Blaze, Newsmax, CNSNEWS, the Daily Caller, Infowars and Natural News are all plunging in popularity, according to Alexa’s rankings.
At the same time, pro-government sites like the Daily Kos, ThinkProgress, Media Matters, MSNBC, NPR.org and Democracy Now! are all rising in popularity, according to Alexa…
Several responded in WND’s first report on the mysterious trend. And more have responded since that article was published, including the head of Breitbart News, who is not buying the new figures released by Alexa.
“Despite increasing traffic on Breitbart.com, the Alexa rankings for Breibart.com dropped significantly in one month. That certainly calls into question Alexa’s newly reported numbers,” Larry Solov, president and CEO of Breitbart News, told WND.
What’s even more surprising is that a top alternative website focusing on health issues, which has been reporting daily on the hottest news topic concerning health in years, Ebola, would also be down in the Alexa rankings.
But that’s exactly what happened to NaturalNews.com, a site operated by Mike Adams, a scientist also known as the “health ranger.”…
http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/10/caught-red-handed-news-site-deception-uncovered/
As Dickens once wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
Yes, we do live in interesting times, mostly ignorant (of facts).
Clearly they have adopted NOAA’s temperature adjustment algorithm to better represent what they think should happen.
Lefty ideas: Ideas so good that we must lie about how popular they are…
I always wondered about censorship and lying in general for lefty causes. We have seen it time and time again from cartoonists from a certain un-named site, and we have seen that at first these campaigns work. They work for a short time period before people wise up and learn the truth. The truth has this bad habit of slipping out and becoming known by all.
So eventually, people might think lefty causes are popular for awhile, until they start talking to people they know and realize that no one in the world is actually watching MSNBC. You see, the way I look at it is like this: Lie all you want for your cause. The fact that you MUST lie for that cause proves that the cause is so unimportant and so stupid that you can not get people fired up without being deceptive. And if that is the case, you are a moron for following a bad cause in the first place…and so you deserve to be mocked and censored and have rotten veggies thrown at you. Let them prove to the world that these causes are pointless and let them prove that they must lie to the people…because eventually people will simply stop believing what alexa says unless they fix this update, and if that happens alexa becomes kind of like climate science: the next pariah who no one will love.
Time makes believers of the truth of all of us. Give em time to hang themselves.
Well, yes, I think now it became more clear to many people how Alexa is making their ranking – based on a toolbar installed by users – and then fudging the results with getting a statistic relevant sample from it – from where they could extract almost anything that they want.
The result is somehow influenced by reality but can be fudged with “ad nauseam” depending how the sample is being computed.
And as mentioned by somebody above, a reputation is won slowly, through hard work, but can be destroyed much faster. Not sure how much did Alexa won through this adjustment, but sure they lost.
And indeed that fact that one MUST lie for “the cause” really proves a lot
Must have been an upside down proxy-method….
Hockey Stick like.
Another October surprise, hits mean ad money. Time to ramp up money for the November midterms to protect Democrat Senators.
mann found a new job
THANK YOU for explaining what’s going on. One of the most politically incorrect sites is catholicfundamentalism.com. It’s also growing on Facebook. Yet, the Alexa ratings just went from 65,000 to 95,000 in less than a week! At the same time, Similar to WUWT, the WordPress counter has shown record, and growing, readership. So, the same changes are being worked on very small sites like catholicfundamentalism.com AND the much larger sites like this.
UPDATE: In two more days, the catholicfundamentalsm.com DROPPED another 35,000, and is now at 130,000 (down from 73,000 at the beginning of the month) despite actual increases recorded on the actual site. This is a wonderful compliment to all the sites that have been diminished.
This has happened to a few websites I have been noticing. One of my personal favorite websites (http://TheLifeStyleElite.com) was in the 50,000s at the beginning of this month,and now just two weeks in they are in the 100,000s. So it is affecting all website I mean if what you are saying is true it’s most likely they only deal with real ranking if you pay them.
I’m not using Alexa any more – http://www.similarweb.com is the most accurate tool to measure any website traffic.
I use the WUWT tool bar that had an option to display the Alexa ranking for the site my Firefox browser was on. That option is no longer displayed on the toolbar since I updated firefox. Could this be the explanation for the drop in rankings? The rest of the toolbar works.
The Alexa Toolbar Creator is no longer supported, as of Oct 2, 2014
That combined with a firefox upgrade may account for the drop?
http://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/203271020