Australian Alexa Rank and St Kilda vs Derryn Hinch #dickileaks
I keep telling myself to stop watching this situation and stop reading about it. At the same time, I still keep getting occassionally relevant Twitter data, Alexa data and Facebook data. (Otherwise, I’m not really collecting from sites like ebay, delicious, digg, YouTube.) The most recent bit of discussion involving this particular scandal has involved Derryn Hinch. The nicest way of phrasing the comments is that Hinch is acting as an agent provocateur, using the scandal to boost his own media visibility. I was curious as to the extent that his visibility could be measured against St Kilda’s visibility given my normal methods of gathering data. The two best ways are Twitter and Alexa. I opted for Alexa because I’ve not been getting Twitter data every day like I normally do.
Hinch’s website can be found at hinch.net. Hinch’s site on Alexa is found at siteinfo/hinch.net. St Kilda’s site is at saints.com.au and their Alexa info is at siteinfo/saints.com.au. saintsational.com is a heavily visited Saints fansite that is also included. Australian rank is used because that’s the Saints’s primary market. Chart below.
I don’t particularly like Alexa for Australian rankings. It is easily manipulated. See ozziesport.com. I have the Alexa toolbar installed. I visit my site at least once a day, probably for an hour a day. I probably get one or two other visits a day from other Australians who have the toolbar installed. Those two things probably explain why ozziesport.com ranks better in Australia on Alexa than the Saints’s site and Hinch’s site. The Saints and Hinch aren’t probably relying on themselves visiting regularly to improve their rank.
That said, as some one with out access to their Google Analytics logs and with neither site being quantified like like mine, this Alexa data is the best way I have of determining passive interest. (Wikipedia article views probably could also be used. Twitter follows imply higher levels of interest. Not so passive.)
Alexa also provides a bit of a demographic profile of people who visit a site. This can be interesting. (And during the main part of the St Kilda scandal, the profile of who visited St Kilda’s site didn’t change.) The following is the description of St Kilda’s audience:
There are 304,737 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Saints.com.au. About 4% of visits to the site are referred by search engines. Relative to the overall population of internet users, the site’s audience tends to be both uneducated and highly educated; it also appeals more to childless men earning over $60,000 who browse from work. Saints.com.au is in the “St. Kilda Saints” category of websites. Roughly 50% of visits to it are bounces (one pageview only).
The following is a description of Hinch’s audience:
There are 495,994 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Hinch.net. The site has been online since 2000, and the time spent in a typical visit to the site is about four minutes, with two minutes spent on each pageview. The site is in the “Personalities” category. The fraction of visits to Hinch.net referred by search engines is about 7%.
The Saints fansite has the following description:
Saintsational.com is ranked #690,216 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. The site belongs to the “St. Kilda Saints” category. The site has been online for at least eight years. Saintsational.com is relatively popular among users in the cities of Glenroy (where it is ranked #24), Hobart (#64), and Melbourne (#2,159). We estimate that 62% of visitors to the site come from Australia, where it has attained a traffic rank of 35,618.
For control with my own site?
There are 248,165 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Ozziesport.com. We estimate that 94% of visitors to the site come from Australia, where it has attained a traffic rank of 2,085. The fraction of visits to the site referred by search engines is about 7%. Ozziesport.com has a bounce rate of roughly 34% (i.e., 34% of visits consist of only one pageview). Visitors to it spend roughly nineteen minutes per visit to the site and 88 seconds per pageview.
What this suggests to me is that Saints fans are loyal visitors, who regularly visit the site. It also suggests that Hinch’s audience are visiting his site largely in response to his updated blog posts about the scandal.
So take that as you will. Hinch appears to be getting more traffic than the Saints amongst the social media/marketing/public relations set than the Saints. The Saints have a loyal audience while Hinch’s traffic is more dependent on the content he is posting.
