Albany Websites

As someone who is seen by Albany media as a prospective advertiser, I sometimes get interesting information.

Back in May I attended an event in Colonie where one local media outlet (you can guess who) was bragging about its website. The sheet they handed out on this provided some numbers for April traffic; I'm adding current Alexa rank:

Media Company	Unique Visitors	Alexa Rank
Times Union	218,500	15,715
News-9	114,600	114,024
WTEN	94,300	194,915
WNYT	91,400	176,980

Not included in the list, cbs6albany.com has an Alexa rank of 81,075, higher than the competition. Meanwhile, fox23news.com is at 333,424.

Our traffic court website has an Alexa rank (today) of 309,504. We're actually ahead of the website for the local station of a network affiliate. As far as unique visitors go, we're just behind WTEN and WNYT. We are growing fast and have passed 75,000/month. At this rate there's a good chance we'll pass them by the end of the year. We will probably pass the Times Union sometime next year. Keep in mind that our site has a national appeal - we cover 13 states and will eventually cover the whole US and maybe Canada. The local media appeals mainly to locals.

Our Alexa rank is further behind. Many of our visitors look at only one page of our site. We hope to soon add content that gets them to stay a little, but that's not really what the site is for. People want the phone number of the court, or directions perhaps. They usually get that on the first or second page, and then don't need us any more.

Among leading alternative media sites, The Albany Project is back at Alexa rank of 778,303, and alt print media The Metroland is at 444,285.

More Traffic Court News

Our Traffic Court website has shot up in the world a bit. According to Alexa, the site is now among the top 350,000 websites in the world. That's a big jump, but not really because of an increase in the importance of our site.

Alexa changed the way it measures websites. They had been criticized for some time for relying too much on their own "toolbar". It's unclear exactly how they've changed their measurement, but it appears they are adding other techniques. For us it's great, but others are unhappy with the change.

Who knows if it really means anything. We know that visits to our site have grown. We're very close to a consistent 60,000 unique users per month. We've added a bunch of new courts in California, Florida and Ohio. Sooner or later those pages will start to attract more attention and the site traffic should go up a bit more.

Alexa traffic rankings bias?

I keep hearing about Alexa and how Alexa ranks websites. I checked it out today. My three most "successful" websites are ranked by Alexa. This blog is in the 5 million range (i.e. there are a bit over 5 million websites that get more traffic than this blog).

What I found interesting is that my law firm site, redlichlaw.com, at #1,282,824, outranks our traffic court directory site, town-court.com, at #1,641,944.

Alexa, which is owned by Amazon, explains its ranking process on a page called About the Alexa Traffic Rankings. This says that the traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users.

But town-court.com had a lot more traffic in the last three months than redlichlaw.com - roughly 50,000 unique users versus maybe 20,000. Even the previous three months the directory had more visitors than the law firm site.

This tells me there's clearly something wrong with Alexa's ranking system. My first guess is that there's a lot more Alexa toolbars on the west coast than on the east coast. My law firm site gets a lot of visitors looking for things related to California speeding tickets. The directory site doesn't have any courts in California -- but that's coming soon. :-)

Check out the Alexa Global Top 500 if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Update: I noticed another explanation - that Alexa toolbars are used more by people in the search engine optimization industry. That's from a post on Search Engine Journal.

Further update: After reading that post, I checked out compete.com. Their absolute numbers are off - my sites get a lot more traffic than we're getting credit for, but the trends looks accurate and the comparison between them also is about right.