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WatchMojo NewsletterAs of noon today, looking at Google Analytics (there’s a delay in reporting of a few hours) WatchMojo.com is having its best day ever traffic-wise.
In fact, in October we saw unique user growth of 40% 70% and pageview increases of 25% 50% month-over-month.
Booyah.
From TechCrunch:
“Kevin Rose introduced Digg to the world in a December 2004 episode of The Screen Savers (Kevin was a host of the show). The video clip, now safely archived at YouTube, is embedded below.
Kevin discusses Slashdot to start the clip, saying its a great site, but he also says that the fact that editors control what’s on the home page of Slashdot “takes the power away from the people.” He then gives a demo of digg (great v.1 screenshots), which he says “looks much like a Slashdot,” but gives the power “back to the people.” At no point in the clip does Kevin state that he is the founder or in any way connected with Digg.”
Flagrant violation of any journalistic ethics… but oh well… very cool to see this back in 2004, before Digg.com took off.
Three things:
1 - Must.Increase.Traffic
Growing a website’s traffic is hard, much harder than it was in earlier years. I’ll write more about this later on.
Like many people, I use Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) and look at it every day to see traffic trends on our media properties. We can see that traffic has been steadily growing day-after-day, month-over-month.
Upon reading TechCrunch’s post on Digg being shortchanged by comScore Media Metrix and Fred Wilson’s defense of Media Metrix, I thought: “man, there must be a better way to do this.”
There is. More on that in a bit.
Mr. Wilson is right in thinking that comScore Media Metrix can’t be all that “flaky” since investors, media buyers and others use online audience measurement services like it (or Nielsen//NetRatings’). But, the fact is that these interested parties use these services because there is no better alternative and not because they’re all that great. In other words: if you are a large ad agency looking at buying ads on site A and site B on behalf of an advertiser, you need something to cover your derriere. Bottom line is that these services are great for relative analysis (site A vs. site B), but not absolute analysis (one site’s traffic).
HitWise has also entered the fray, and while it’s a nice product I’ve used, I could not even tell you how it’s all that much better or different (note to self: research that).
As online measurement services, both use a panel of surfers to project estimates of traffic. Even for large sites, the variance is massive. For example, according to NNR, Wikipedia.org generates some 60M uniques, according to Media Metrix, it generates 130M. I know what you’re thinking: “slight difference.”
Imagine an investor that tries to estimate the value of a property using either service. They would miss by a mile. In our exercise where we tried to determine the value of Wikipedia.org, the value ranged quite a bit depending on which service’s traffic we used.
This is obviously a problem.
But, it gets worst.
2 - Alexa is one of the best and worst things online.
Alexa is good because it provides a free and readily available gauge of a site’s traffic rank relative to others. But, Alexa is wildly erratic and erroneous: it’s biased towards techies who have downloaded the Alexa toolbar (which most anti-spyware programs view as a threat to your computer, by the way). All to say, Alexa is not quite representative of the broader Web universe, but neither are Nielsen//NetRatings, Hitwise or comScore Media Metrix.
Allow me to vent a bit: our traffic has been growing slowly but surely since our launch in January 2006. We contact advertising agencies, potential investors contact us, and both stakeholders seem to look at Alexa. We give them our log stats (we’re still not getting the magical number to pop up on Nielsen//NetRatings or comScore Media Metrix - though we will soon) so Alexa is what many look to for guidance. Finally, we’re starting to gain some traction there, but even as the Alexa ranking grows, I make it a duty to explain to people why Alexa is not the solution.
Google’s Foray in Analytics?
I’ve always maintained that Google Analytics can make a dent against Media Metrix, Nielsen//NetRatings, Hitwise and Alexa because it’s not a panel, but rather, a site-specific measurement of traffic. Formerly known as Urchin, its competitors are numerous and include WebSideStory.
Here is what Google should do:
- Allow website owners to make public their Google Analytics traffic. Say we generate 1M unique users according to our third party internal logs but comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen//NetRatings give us 500K and 600K uniques respectively, as a publisher, I would gladly make public this number. Why wouldn’t I?
Overnight, Google would become very relevant in the space and become more relevant than Alexa.
- Google could then compile and aggregate the traffic rankings based on Google Analytics’s unique count and publish those, giving an extra incentive for websites to publish and adopt Google Analytics.
Over time, more and more analysts, investors and ad agencies would look at Google Analytics and not the “flaky and not so flaky” sources. The best part is that once this adoption reaches most sites, the traffic we quote would be site-specific and not panel-based. This would make Google way too powerful for many to embrace, but they already own 50% of the search market, are the only company I can see having the resources to make this free and available to all.
And, it’s not like the flaky and not so flaky online audience measurement services have too little power, now is it?
There you have it.
I used to work in call centers, I loved the experience and have the utmost respect for people on the phone. It’s a tough job. Those folks get sent out to the front lines and management hardly cares! They say they do, but they don’t.
So everytime something goes arwry and I have to call a customer service rep, I welcome it, but realize that in all likelihood, they can’t do what I have asked them to do no matter how reasonable and simple it might be (yet they dare ask if “there’s anything else they can do for” me?).
As such, I immediately ask for a higher up. I know you are judged by how efficiently you use your time, so am I.
Earlier this year, I wrote in depth about my adventures with venerable Hewlett Packard. In a nutshelll, they sold me a piece of crap that was posing for an all-in-one printer and fax. They sent me a refurbished piece of crap to replace the original piece of crap.
The problem was that the “refurbished” all-in-one printer and fax was equally defective.
When I called the wonderful people at HP to inform them about this, they offered to - get this - you got it: send me another refurbished one. I think my call was escalated ten times until I spoke to someone with the authority to send me a brand new printer.
It works, like HP’s otherwise fine products do. I told the first HP employee I spoke to that I would inevitably get a new printer. I got the new printer. Did we need to go through those ten calls?
As a result, I will consider buying HP products in the future. Hey, every fine company can produce a lemon every once a while, so I forgive HP about the initial crapbox they sold me. Had they replaced the original printer with a new one and not made a fuss about sending me a new one after the second printer, I’d only buy HP. But they didn’t. I had to fight for it.
Management lesson 101: HP sort of redeemeded itself to at least be in the running for our business in the future, but they could have locked it for good had they acted long term. Assuming you need more details, read more here and here.
Today I had to call Seagate. Seagate Technology “engages in the design, manufacture, and marketing of disc drives for enterprise, desktop, mobile computing, consumer electronics, and branded solutions markets of the disc drive industry.” At the macro-level, the need for Seagate’s products will rise in the future, though by how much depends on where flash storage vis-a-vis hard drives. Seagate is betting on hard drives; its competitor SanDisk Corporation is betting on flash. Sandisk “engages in the design, development, and market of flash storage card products used in various consumer electronics worldwide. Its products include flash cards, Universal Serial Bus, flash drives, and digital audio players.”
But, while Sandisk and Seagate might not be direct competitors, Seagate has more than enough competition from others in its direct market. You’d think it would be smart to retain clients.
Today I called them to tell them that one of the numerous hard drives we bought (less than two months ago!) crapped out on us. Our company WatchMojo.com produces video for the Web. We’re in month 10 of operations and have 2,500 video clips.
Do the math Seagate: We’ll be buying up storage devices for the rest of our business’ life. That is the kind of client Seagate would love to have, one would think.
Of course, when I called, they offered to send me a refurbished one. Naturally, I asked for someone who could authorize a new drive. I am all for sending call center jobs overseas, but if you do and reap savings, then make sure you don’t replace a crappy drive with another crappy drive. It’s that simple.
We’ll tell you if Seagate learns from HP’s mistake. Stay tuned.
Interesting post by TechCrunch on Digg being acquired, potentially. Read that here.
Michael Arrington calls comScore “flaky,” VC Fred Wilson counters here. Mind you, he is an investor of the online measurement company.
Here are our thoughts on online audience measurement services and why guess who might crush them all if it chose to.
