Here is a radical idea. Create a truly accurate way to measure a web site’s performance so property managers can accurately assess which online rental ad site will provide them the most traffic to their property ads.
Alexa is a free way to measure a site’s performance currently. If you have never tried it, go to Alexa.com and then enter your site to find your ranking among all the other sites on the web. You want to have a low number.
For instance RentVine.com’s ranking currently is 146,695 on Alexa.
The problem with Alexa is that it can be gamed way too easily. The results on Alexa can be artificially inflated by automated means. I am not saying that my competitor’s are doing this, I am just saying you really can’t trust the ranking. To be fair, a site ranking 10,000 or less on Alexa I believe is pretty accurate. Only one of my competitors has rankings below this level, which is RentClicks.com.
What I propose is a non profit .org type site that will aggregate all of the classified site’s stats similar how Google Analytics’s does. The site could be called something like ClassifiedStats.org. It would use Java Script code that reports back to the to ClassifiedStats.org each time a page is loaded.
Site’s like RentVine.com could then display a badge on the site indicating a stat which would be pulled from ClassifiedStats.org such as monthly unique visitors.
I think this would be a useful service for property managers if each one of my competitors would also included a badge on their site as well. The question is would my competitors be willing to join in?
You might think an Opt-In program like this would not be used by smaller sites like RentVine.com because they would not want people to know how much behind they are from the competition. But I would participate, because I think that property managers would appreciate my honesty. And if my smaller site is climbing in the rankings, I think property managers would notice that by looking at a graph on the ClassifiedStats.org site showing an upward trend.
I have no idea who would create the ClassifiedStats.org site (perhaps a company like Craigslist.org could). I have no idea how it would be implemented, as well as which stat would be used for the badge (I am sure there would be much debate on this issue).
This radical idea came from Jason Calacanis keynote speech at the SES conference in Chicago on Tuesday.
I believe a site like ClassifiedStats.org will be created in the next few years. I think the demand for it is here today.
What are your thoughts, do you think that this would be a valuable feature for sites like RentVine?
[tags]Alexa, Jason Calacanis, stats, property managers[/tags]
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2 users responded in this post
Hi Dave,
Interesting concept.
What is it about Alexa that allows it to be easily gamed?
How would ClassifiedStats.org address this and would those contermeasures affect usability?
I have heard of stories where people set up Alexa toolbars on many computers that have ip addresses that constant change and then hit their own site to raise the Alexa ranking using an automated process. This has been happening for years.
Eddie, you bring up a good question, perhaps ClassifiedStats.org can be gamed just as easy. But ClassifiedStats.org would be a lot more accurate because it is not using sample data like Alexa uses.
Perhaps it is not the best idea that I have come up with - but interesting to think about.
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