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Bonds Are a 'Safe' Investment: A Big Lie Gets Even BiggerAccording to audience figures at Alexa which measures traffic and page views at hundreds of thousands of internet websites, many of the Time Warner online properties are having trouble maintaining their audiences.
Alexa measures audience for the most recent day, a weekly average, and a three month average. The measurement system also shows the change in the three month average versus the previous three months. Alexa's system tracks usage on millions of toolbars downloaded onto PCs by their users. There has always been some debate about whether the figures are as accurate as numbers from some of Alexa's competitors. A "sense check" of the top sites on Alexa does make sense. Worldwide, Yahoo!.com is ranked first, followed by MSN, Google, baidu.com, qq.com, MySpace and sina.com. The presence of several large Chinese websites seems logical.
The Alexa system competes to some extent with the two large web audience measurement firms, Neilsen/NetRatings and Comscore.
The figures are particularly important now, especially as AOL migrates from a subscription-supported model to one that relies primarily on internet advertising.
- Of all websites measured by Alexa, AOL.com ranks No. 36. Based on the Alexa methodology, AOL.com has dropped seven places from where it stood three months ago. Average page views at 5.2 per day, have dropped 4% over the same period.
- Another large site which is part of the AOL network is Mapquest. Mapquest ranks No. 102 among all sites measured. This is a drop of 27 places from where it was three months ago. Page views are down .2% to 4.1 a day.
- AIM.com, the site for the company's instant messaging platform, ranks No. 310, and has risen sharply, up 84 places in the rankings over the last three months. Number of page views a day have remained unchanged at 1.7.
- ICQ.com, AOL's large chat and forum site, ranks No. 259 on Alexa. This is up 29 spots in the last three months. Pages views per user stand at 3 per day, up 4%.
- Winamp.com, the site for AOL's multimedia player software, ranks No. 509, down 4 spots. Page views are up 7% to 3.3 per day.
- Netscape.com, AOL's new "all blog, all the time" site ranks No. 307 in Alexa. This is down 145 places. Page views, at 2.7, are down 3%.
- Leaving out BloggingStocks.com would be an oversight. The site ranks No. 27,848, up 63,483 spots over the last three months. Page views per day are flat at 1.6.
- CNN.com is the largest web domain owned by Time Warner outside of AOL. It includes traffic from sites like Sports Illustrated and CNNMoney in its figures. CNN ranks No. 31 in Alexa, down six positions over the last three months. Page views are flat at 4.2 per user per day.
The Alexa rankings do not paint a terribly rosy picture for AOL right now. The largest properties, like AOL.com and Mapquest.com, cannot afford to have further attrition if the advertising model is AOL's bet for getting the company back on track.
AOL watchers next cut at the audience outlook will be when NetRatings puts out figures for the month of August which should be on September 10. AOL should hope that NetRatings does not confirm the Alexa figures for the company's larger web properties.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-05-2006 @ 4:04PM
Pete Carr said...
Alexa does count as a representative sampling. Recently, the father of exit polling died. Exit polling is regarded as a benchmark for statistics, and a prime example of representative sampling.
It is no surprise that AOL is slipping in their rankings. They are coming late to migration from dial-up to high speed. As more Internet users become "net savvy", AOL will lose more shares to stand alone Internet applications consisting of a high speed connection, Firefox (or IE) browser, and an IM client or two. The changes in both AIM.com and ICQ.com seem to bear this out. Throw in IRC chat, and most users would be happy. The rise of RSS is also fueling the exit from AOL and CNN.
Mapquest, once a prime mapping site, is facing competition from Google Maps, and as Google adds products, other sites will see the decrease in users.
The downside of Alexa is that at the highest scores, those in the top 1000, a change in rankings equates to only a change in the thousands of percents of overall users. Should AOL and related Time Warner sites slip to an Alexa ranking in the thousands or so, that would indicate a sea change in users, but a change of a few hundred points is not sufficient to gauge a large loss of users.
Watching our own changes at Chatmag.com in the Alexa rankings, going from over 100,000 into 66,000 or so, and comparing that to actual server figures leads me to believe that Alexa is right on target as a gauge of overall usage.
9-05-2006 @ 2:42PM
douglas mcintyre said...
I will have to disagree with you about the Time Warner sites. I think the three month averages are very accurate. As you said, it measures yours well, and it does the same with my small website.