Comments on: Usage graph irregularities

Usage graph irregularities

jonson — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:09:07 -0800

Curious - what happened approximately 3 months ago that doubled the daily reach of metafilter, according to this graphic?

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:43:30 -0800

Alexa traffic rankings depend on users who have installed the alexa ~~spyware~~ browser toolbar. They are often cited as being only approximate. I wouldn't be surprised if there was just some kind of measurement error or mass adjustment on that day.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:52:27 -0800

Alexa changed their ranking system somehow. There was actually a metatalk thread about it when it happened, and matt said that there wasn't any more traffic.

One thing I did just notice is that alexa now ranks different blogs on blogspot separately, rather then all being part of one mega-popular site.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:53:26 -0800

Flickr also has a huge jump at the same time.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:55:15 -0800

digg.com is another site with a similar spike

By: delmoi

delmoi — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:58:33 -0800

And so is del.icio.us. It seems like a lot of sites like that got a spike that day.

By: loquacious

loquacious — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:00:43 -0800

Can someone explain the metrics of those graphs? What does "daily reach (per million)" mean?

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:09:45 -0800

read this

By: loquacious

loquacious — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:25:12 -0800

Thanks.

By: armoured-ant

armoured-ant — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 02:30:22 -0800

This is a total guess, and I haven't read the link above, but it strikes me that Alexa may have, on this date, added another system of monitoring to their arsenal, thus increasing their total input in numbers.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 05:33:29 -0800

Some searching yeilds some discussion of this spike elsewhere on the Internets, with a lot of speculation, but no official answers. A Wikipedia statistics page mentions that Alexa introduced by-country rankings in April. Maybe this change meant there was an algorithm change?

By: Krrrlson

Krrrlson — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 07:24:15 -0800

That was the official date for Web 2.0 activation.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 08:40:16 -0800

SkyNET came online.

By: loquacious

loquacious — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 09:27:39 -0800

We have signal. Main screen turn on.

By: cellphone

cellphone — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:09:12 -0800

it's 'we get signal'

By: shmegegge

shmegegge — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 16:05:40 -0800

somebody

i can't do it.

somebody set us up the...

fuck you guys.

By: graventy

graventy — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 19:48:59 -0800

Mushroom thread.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:39:31 -0800

How long has Metafilter been displayed on popurls?

By: marbant

marbant — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:45:38 -0800

in fact popurls has helped a lot of site to grow, see this for example:
alexa - newsvine /popurls

ps: i'm the founder of popurls

By: cribcage

cribcage — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 23:14:05 -0800

Because like threads should be linked.

By: cortex

cortex — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 23:19:52 -0800

In Soviet Russia, linked threads like YOU!