ALEXA and the Numbers: How Does Your TGP Compare?
Your stats are key to understanding how well your site and marketing campaigns are going. But how well are you doing in comparison to your competitors? Finding out is the business of competitive intelligence - and that takes you to a concern with other webmasters numbers.
Only recently, and right here, Kath Blackwell was stressing the importance of hard quantitative data to making important business decisions about your site and its performance: "Today's successful webmaster needs to know his stats and make choices according to the data found in his stats-as he will surely live or die by those stats." [Kath Blackwell. "Playing the numbers game: do your stats measure up?" Klixxx Magazine (November, 2003). LINK]
Numbers don't lie. You need to make sure you measure the numbers important to your business and some are more important than others: "Weeding out the important information from the not-so-important information is vital to taking a proper 'temperature' of how your site is doing." She goes through the most basic and important metrics pertaining to a site:
- Customer statistics
- Overall sales figures
- Usage details
These are key to your decision-making. Also important is competitive intelligence-knowing how everyone else is doing and how you compare. That involves dealing with other people's numbers and the state of your market/niche as a whole. Admittedly, your own metrics come first and competitive intelligence takes some work-but there are people like myself who outsource this and much to glean from the resource sites and Klixxx. But here is a taste of what can be done for a specific example-Thumbnail Gallery Posts.
One Way to Do It
A sample of general TGPs (no niche- or media-specialized ones such as Mature or Movies) was compiled from the first five pages of Google and Yahoo! results, all the Open Directory (www.dmoz.com) entries, and the listings in Myporn.com's "Pic Post Sites" and Persiankitty.com's "Fresh Sites." Additional "friends" or "recommended" sites referenced on the TGPs themselves were also added. TGP2 sites were excluded. The resulting list of 130 high-profile TGP sites is representative if neither random nor complete-found the same way a typical porn surfer would have found them.
Information about these sites was gathered from Alexa (www.alexa.com). Alexa is a search engine with Google and Open Directory results enhanced by Alexa. Alexa does a pretty good search, but more important here is that it also provides in-depth site information and statistics. The following were recorded for each site:
- Country
- Speed
- Traffic rank
- Number of sites linking
- Online since
- Reach per million users
- Reach rank
- Page views per user
- Page views rank
Sometimes Alexa was missing data, but this was filled in by examining the site (e.g. Speed) or the Whois registry (Country, Online Since). The result is a good picture of the TGP world, all ready for a closer look.
Traffic Rank
Alexa's traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from the 10 million-plus Alexa Toolbar users, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web daily. Traffic rank is then determined from the geometric mean of these two measures averaged over time.
So traffic rank isn't a count as such, but an ordinal-showing where a site stands in relation to all other sites. And there are a lot of other sites. According to Robyn Greenspan ["Porn pages reach 260 million," Internet.com 09/25/03. LINK] there are 4.2 million adult Web sites-12 percent of the total number of all Web sites. One-quarter of total daily search engine requests, or 68 million, are for adult material, where 40 million Americans are regular visitors.
Therefore, a webmaster should not be dismayed to be ranked at 2000 (or 20,000)-that's doing fabulously well considering the total volume of sites and traffic. Here are the 25 most-trafficked TGPs in this sample of 130, as of the day of my research:
Top 25 Most Highly Trafficked TGPs
| Site |
Traffic Rank |
Online Since |
Ownership |
| Sleazy Dream |
350 |
2000 |
Canada |
| 89.com |
390 |
1997 |
USA |
| XNXX.com |
589 |
2002 |
Europe |
| Hun's Yellow Pages |
655 |
1997 |
Europe |
| World Sex |
797 |
1996 |
Europe |
| Pichunter |
989 |
2001 |
USA |
| EasyGals |
995 |
2002 |
Europe |
| AL-4A |
1327 |
1997 |
Australia |
| MMM100 |
1356 |
1998 |
Europe |
| Thumbzilla |
1592 |
1999 |
USA |
| Call Kelly's |
2041 |
1996 |
USA |
| Elephant List |
2104 |
1999 |
Peru |
| SearchGals |
2350 |
2002 |
Europe |
| Pervert Pictures |
2371 |
2002 |
Brazil |
| Absolute Series |
2750 |
1999 |
USA |
| Global Freepics |
2828 |
2000 |
Canada |
| JJJ's TGP |
2918 |
1997 |
USA |
| Raw Pussy |
3019 |
1997 |
USA |
| Sexzool |
4813 |
2002 |
Europe |
| Gallery View Center |
5158 |
2001 |
Eastern Europe |
| Zadina's Sex Palace |
5226 |
2001 |
Europe |
| PinkWorld |
5466 |
1999 |
USA |
| Fuckk Galleries |
6261 |
1999 |
USA |
| 88by88.com |
6373 |
2002 |
USA |
| Sexmaxx |
6560 |
1999 |
Europe |
These ranks are based on the average traffic over three months, but a different three months might tell another story. So would a monthly or weekly average. Alexa has data for different time periods. It will also graph it.
Although Pichunter and EasyGals have almost identical traffic ranks, graphs bring out the actual pattern of traffic to the sites and disclose interesting events-something catastrophic like a hardware problem or hacker attack obviously befell Pichunter last Summer. At about the same time it looks like EasyGals was having success with some kind of enhancement or marketing campaign. Alexa allows up to four of your competitors to be graphed on the same chart-good for comparisons.
You can take a closer look at other data Alexa provides by counting it up. For example, the year these sites first went online. About a third of them were established in 1998 or earlier, mostly 1996-1997, which is a high proportion of well-established old-timers in this business. And there's something peculiar too-almost 70% of all the highly-trafficked sites went online in three specific years: 1997, 1999, and 2002. The reason for this is probably worth knowing, but, as they say "is a subject for further research."
PART TWO: Reach and Page Values
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