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This argument doesn't make sense. Should Tumblr not get credit for subdomained blogs, or Wordpress.com? This seems tantamount to not giving Facebook or Pinteres

by dmor 13y ago

This argument doesn't make sense. Should Tumblr not get credit for subdomained blogs, or Wordpress.com? This seems tantamount to not giving Facebook or Pinterest credit for logged in sessions. How is this traffic any less an indicator of usage?

wilfra 13y ago
I think you're referring to Zendesk. Insofar as Alexa's rankings are accurate (they aren't, but that's another matter) then Zendesk.com is indeed the 650th highest trafficked site on the internet and they are clearly getting a lot of usage. That's great for Zendesk, but it says very little about how they compare to other B2B companies. Just as a low Alexa rank (above a certain minimum threshold - say 500,000) tells you very little about how a given B2B company is doing. Example: Website A: CRM software for real estate agents that charges $2,000 per month. Alexa rank 120,000. Website B: in the same business but gives their software away free, lets users host blogs on their site and advertises with popups served from the domain (a huge Alexa boost to lots of porn sites, ad networks and others) and as a result has an Alexa rank of 9,000. If you were to do a post on the real estate CRM industry you'd probably dump on company A and praise company B - even though we know essentially nothing about either business. Website A could be doing millions per month in revenue and have 50+ employees and B could be one guy working nights and weekends and making $2,000 per month. tl;dr apples-to-apples comparisons between B2B companies based on homepage traffic stats = fail.
- wilfra 13y ago
  More examples: http://www.csc.com/ http://www.csc.com/ Alexa 30,000 - Market Cap $7.1 Billion https://www.saic.com/ https://www.saic.com/ Alexa 43,000 - Market Cap $5 Billion And just a random one I've used that I knew would have a high Alexa given how their service works: http://unbounce.com/ http://unbounce.com/ Alexa 6,000 - Total employees 20, total funding $850k (per crunchbase) If you were to rank these three companies, unbounce would be on top and you'd be telling the CEO's of two companies worth a combined $12 Billion+ to stop whining and be more like unbounce.
  - dmor 13y ago
    It. is. not. ranked. by. web. traffic. Web traffic is one of several signals used to produce the ranking.
    - wilfra 13y ago
      Then maybe you shouldn't say things like this? "Think your B2B startup shouldn’t be expected to ever have meaningful web traffic? Twilio is #13,158 in global web traffic and Zendesk is #650, so don’t even try that line on me." P.S. I remain a big fan of what you're doing here - was just trying to help. Looking forward to the next post.

by dmor 13y ago

wilfra 13y ago

I think you're referring to Zendesk. Insofar as Alexa's rankings are accurate (they aren't, but that's another matter) then Zendesk.com is indeed the 650th highest trafficked site on the internet and they are clearly getting a lot of usage. That's great for Zendesk, but it says very little about how they compare to other B2B companies. Just as a low Alexa rank (above a certain minimum threshold - say 500,000) tells you very little about how a given B2B company is doing. Example: Website A: CRM software for real estate agents that charges $2,000 per month. Alexa rank 120,000. Website B: in the same business but gives their software away free, lets users host blogs on their site and advertises with popups served from the domain (a huge Alexa boost to lots of porn sites, ad networks and others) and as a result has an Alexa rank of 9,000. If you were to do a post on the real estate CRM industry you'd probably dump on company A and praise company B - even though we know essentially nothing about either business. Website A could be doing millions per month in revenue and have 50+ employees and B could be one guy working nights and weekends and making $2,000 per month. tl;dr apples-to-apples comparisons between B2B companies based on homepage traffic stats = fail.

wilfra 13y ago
More examples: http://www.csc.com/ http://www.csc.com/ Alexa 30,000 - Market Cap $7.1 Billion https://www.saic.com/ https://www.saic.com/ Alexa 43,000 - Market Cap $5 Billion And just a random one I've used that I knew would have a high Alexa given how their service works: http://unbounce.com/ http://unbounce.com/ Alexa 6,000 - Total employees 20, total funding $850k (per crunchbase) If you were to rank these three companies, unbounce would be on top and you'd be telling the CEO's of two companies worth a combined $12 Billion+ to stop whining and be more like unbounce.
- dmor 13y ago
  It. is. not. ranked. by. web. traffic. Web traffic is one of several signals used to produce the ranking.
  - wilfra 13y ago
    Then maybe you shouldn't say things like this? "Think your B2B startup shouldn’t be expected to ever have meaningful web traffic? Twilio is #13,158 in global web traffic and Zendesk is #650, so don’t even try that line on me." P.S. I remain a big fan of what you're doing here - was just trying to help. Looking forward to the next post.