I decided to merge my thoughts on WebDate and Alexa into one post.
The Interview contains lot’s of talk about mobile dating and the future of Webdate. Let me tell you about the mobile dating. Nobody is doing it, yet. In iDate Miami we learned that mobile dating ranked #13 on consumers list of what they value most about a dating service. MatchMobile was never able to get much more than 100,000 paying customers If I remember correctly.
As for the future of WebDate, expect massive loss of members if/when they move to a paid model. Tiered or not, free and #5 doesn’t mean much if all you’re doing is earning revenue from banner ads. With all the spyware/malware out there, these rankings are useless and Hitwise better smarten up. (Ed:Looks like they did, read on for more about new HitWise ranking system).
Buying crappy traffic from toolbar vendors may inflate your numbers, but those people are usually not serious daters. Someone prove me wrong, please.
Webdate is the 20-something crowd, they don’t pay and they have grown up as voyeurs, of course guys like checking out young women with video cams.
Markus has commented over at Online Personals Watch that HitWise is using a new filter which has dropped WebDate from #5 to 15th position.
The drop in rank shows just how much websites rely on low-quality pop-up and spybar traffic to inflate rankings.
Consumers don’t care much about traffic numbers, they care about quality. I would like to see the referrer logs and the follow-on links for sites. Where did the traffic come from and where did it go?
If you get thousands of visitors that immediately turn away, should those visitors count towards your aggregated traffic rank?
I have to disagree that Alexa is as useful as Markus thinks it is. Relying on statistics gathered from toolbar installs in inherently flawed and inaccurate for a number of reasons.
A site like Corante caters to an internet demographic that probably doesn’t have the Alexa toolbar installed. Many even have Javascript disabled. Then again, people who use free dating sites probably have a ton of toolbars and spyware installed.
A while back OPW or some other site wrote about Bebe.com, a “social networking” site (and I use that terms loosly) getting inordinate amounts of traffic. I looked at Alexa and found this:
Bebo.com gets approximately 6,000 per day, which works out to 180,000 visitors a month.
Bebo is ranked 613 on Alexa.
Corante receives much more unique visitors than 180k per month.
Corante.com is 10,968 on Alexa.
It’s unfortunate that I can’t measure my traffic apples-to-apples against the other blogs because the Corate link love and GoogleJuice is so tremendous. We have links that haven’t been modified for over a year old that are the number one search result on Google.
Now let’s look at Technorati. Technorati is a search engine which tracks weblogs as Google tracks web pages.
Google and Yahoo are fine for searches that focus on content which is not date-sensitive. Technorati adds new blog posts seconds after they are created. Much more immediate understanding about what’s hot right now.
According to Technorati:
Bebo.com: 817 links from 633 websites (1.29 links per site)
Match.com has 673 links from 503 websites (1.33 links per site)
Yahoo Personals: 433 links from 220 websites (1.96 links per site)
Corante: 7,749 links from 4,057 websites(1.91 links per site)
What does this mean? Corante has much more link love than the other sites. People are talking about us a lot more than the other sites. This changes all the time, depending on press releases, media attention and getting Slashdotted (huge traffic spikes). It’s fascinating to watch traffic spikes from media attention, the ensuingGooglejuice (high Google ranking) and then follow-on traffic from news aggregators. Keep in mind that tracking trackbacks on Technorati is leading-edge, and the demographics of the users are decidedly tech-heavy.
Go to Technorati.com yourself and compare your dating site with your competitors.
For those interested in these kinds of things, here is a anti-phishing toolbar from Netcraft.
