Usage graph irregularities

June 21, 2006 12:09 AM

Curious - what happened approximately 3 months ago that doubled the daily reach of metafilter, according to this graphic?
posted by jonson to MetaFilter-Related at 12:09 AM (20 comments total)

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.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:43 AM on June 21, 2006

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.
posted by delmoi at 12:52 AM on June 21, 2006

Flickr also has a huge jump at the same time.
posted by delmoi at 12:53 AM on June 21, 2006

digg.com is another site with a similar spike
posted by delmoi at 12:55 AM on June 21, 2006

And so is del.icio.us. It seems like a lot of sites like that got a spike that day.
posted by delmoi at 12:58 AM on June 21, 2006

Can someone explain the metrics of those graphs? What does "daily reach (per million)" mean?
posted by loquacious at 1:00 AM on June 21, 2006

read this
posted by Rhomboid at 1:09 AM on June 21, 2006

Thanks.
posted by loquacious at 1:25 AM on June 21, 2006

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.
posted by armoured-ant at 2:30 AM on June 21, 2006

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?
posted by Plutor at 5:33 AM on June 21, 2006

That was the official date for Web 2.0 activation.
posted by Krrrlson at 7:24 AM on June 21, 2006

SkyNET came online.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:40 AM on June 21, 2006

We have signal. Main screen turn on.
posted by loquacious at 9:27 AM on June 21, 2006

it's 'we get signal'
posted by cellphone at 3:09 PM on June 21, 2006

somebody




i can't do it.


somebody set us up the...


fuck you guys.
posted by shmegegge at 4:05 PM on June 21, 2006

Mushroom thread.
posted by graventy at 7:48 PM on June 21, 2006

How long has Metafilter been displayed on popurls?
posted by crunchland at 3:39 PM on June 22, 2006

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
posted by marbant at 11:45 PM on June 22, 2006

Because like threads should be linked.
posted by cribcage at 11:14 PM on July 1, 2006

In Soviet Russia, linked threads like YOU!
posted by cortex at 11:19 PM on July 1, 2006