I thought it might be fun to illustrate on Alexa what happens when your company gets bought out by Primedia.
Below is RentClicks after they signed their deal with Primedia over a year ago.
Next one up to be purchased was HomeRentalAds last summer.
And just recently RentalHouses - can you see a trend here?
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I think that’s just a reflection of how unreliable Alexa is. If you look at other sources, you don’t see the same fluctuations.
Alexa,
What do the “other sources” show?
Yes Alexa is unreliable if your site is not in the top 10K, but RentClicks is in the top 10K (7K) so it does show at least a trend.
I wish someone with ComScore or HitWise stats will set me straight on this issue.
I know my top competitors have the good numbers - I wish they would share.
Here is the real catch with Alexa - property managers can’t afford to pay $40K a year on ComScore and they don’t know about the other metric sites out there such as Quantcast.com or Compete.com (unless they read my blog).
So what are they left with to compare sites like mine - Alexa of course because it has been around the longest.
Property managers are smart, they know if RentClicks ranks #1 in Google for their city they will put their ad dollars there.
Google only represents 60% of the search market share so they are not getting the complete picture - but close enough.
Dave,
You should compare the top rental sites on Alexa, Quantcast and Compete.com to get the bigger picture. But I would like to see ComScore data.
I still see the whole industry in a slump considering the seasonality of the rental housing market and the fact things should be jumping moving into Spring!
Alexa……..the Alexa rankings showed those CSI sites going gangbusters before their buyouts…….is that unreliable also?
Kevin,
You bring up a very good point - I understand that some RentClicks sales reps used Alexa data in their presentations to property managers when things were good - I wonder if they are using the data now!
Dave
I agree with Alexa that Alexa is unreliable. I just used it to look at the reach over 3 years for Monster.com, Cnn.com, CareerBuilder.com, Match.com, and AOL.com and all of them show similar downward trends to what you found for your competitors. So are all of the well-known websites in the world losing traffic? Is the internet coming to an end? Nope…it’s just the unreliability of Alexa.
Hi Observation,
Are you saying there is not a correlation with the acquisition of these companies and the decrease in traffic. It is merely coincidental?
There are way too many things that could lead to a decline in Alexa’s results. The biggest flaw with Alexa is that it relies on it’s toolbar to track. With the popularity of Google and Yahoos toolbars growing, I would not be surprised if more and more people are dropping the Alexa toolbar. Fewer users could cause all websites to have a weaker reach in Alexas eyes, but it’s a reflection of their toolbar losing popularity not what’s happening with the websites. Also, as the internet grows in India and Asia, there will be sites there that climb up very high in Alexa results. That will push American sites down in the results, even though the American sites could be experiencing record traffic. In my opinion, Alexa is just useful to compare one site to another, but cannot be used to analyze any deeper than that. So, if you want to know which small-rental website is most popular then you can compare them all and see who’s #1 in that category. And #1 is #1 regardless if they are ranked 200 on Alexa or 200,000.
Hi Observation,
I agree that Alexa may not be the best tool to view traffic data but how can one explain the immediate drop in RentClicks, HomeRentalAds and RentalHouses traffic immediately following the acquisition. Do Alexa users have something against Primedia? Did the “Technical” demographic cease to go to these sites? Is India and Asia taking over the rental market? Are search engines penalizing the acquisition? I don’t see RentClicks in Yahoo the #2 search engine at all.
Susie,
I wonder why Rentclicks isn’t on Yahoo?????
Observation,
We all agree Alexa is flawed….but your observations do not add up. Just look at the graphs for the 3 sites and the time frame in 2006-2007.
Maybe Observation can post the most recent Comscore numbers since he has access to it!
Susie,
You misunderstood my point about India & Asia. Whether or not rental sites are doing well there doesn’t matter. As more sites of all types gain traffic there, it creates more global competition for high Alexa rankings. So, a Japanese search engine could gain Alexa traffic and push down niche American sites that don’t have as much traffic. And as traffic in those countries grow, sites that only focus on America are going to have a weaker reach in the Alexa formula because the American sites get 0% of those users. A simple look at the Alexa Global 500 list shows the impact that foreign websites are having on Alexa rankings:
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none
Since the beginning of 2006 I’ve noticed that a large number of top American based sites have been falling on Alexa, but not in more reliable sources. Just look at the 3 year Alexa graph for Aol.com, MSNBC.com or CNN.com and you’ll see they all started falling in 2006 on Alexa. But from what I can see, all of those sites still have just as strong traffic now as they did then if not stronger. So, Alexa is useful to compare one site to another in a big-picture way. But it’s a waste of time to use it to draw more in-depth conclusions when there are way too many variables that can cloud the picture.
Hi Observation,
Thank you for that. I can see how that affects the Alexa “Traffic Rank” but from the graphs above, it is showing “Daily Reach”. It makes no difference if there are a million more sites out there, the daily reach is based on the own sites traffic. Can anyone help me to figure out why there has been a decrease for the three sites above. I want to make sure my advertising dollars are spent wisely. It can’t be a coincidence?
Susia,
We need to see what the trend has been on Comscore (Media Metrix)! Does anyone have that info they can share?
Susie,
Reach is also affected by the global growth of the web. The Alexa definition of reach is “Percent of global Internet users who visit this site”. It’s a percentage of all the internet users in the world, not a tally of how many visitors a site gets. So, as millions of people in Asia, India, etc get on the web and start browsing sites specific to their countries and ignoring American sites, it decreases the reach for sites that focus on America. So, if you had a strong reach, but then 10 million users in Asia get on the net and you get 0% of them…your reach goes down. But…you might be experiencing record traffic from your American audience. That’s why the reach for sites like CNN, AOL, etc have been steadily going down for the past year.
Hi Susie,
This might help answer your question a bit.
Here is a graph on Google Trends for RentClicks. This is not information based upon people downloading the tool bar but rather a sample of users actually searching for the term RentClicks.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=rentclicks&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
Looks like it matches Alexa data immediately following the acquisition. Either the brand lost value because people no longer search for that term or the brand gained value because people go directly to rentclicks.com.
I think is is the former due to the very nature of how people search. Even if they know where they want to go, some tend to search for it on google first.
From the data I’ve seen, the best free resource that depicts what’s really going on with internet traffic is compete.com. It seems to match things more closely than anything else. Especially better than Alexa, and doesn’t rely on the assumption that people search for a URL rather than typing it like the Trends approach does. Compete isn’t perfect either, but it seems much more accurate than anything else out there.
What a buzz you’ve grown! I have to snicker a little as I read this. First, there is no value in trends data without a control group. If you don’t show the trend for Apartments.com and ApartmentGuide.com and Rent.Net, as well as a non rental site such as travelocity.com, then you are only showing the side of the story you want to show. Not fair, monsoir! Lots of things can contribute to that graph, interest rates, economy, mortage foreclosures, etc. We’re in a strange time right now as people own more then they can afford. Rental real estate investors are selling properties as their ARMs run out and they are just spending less money on advertising. …and Alexa? son, you’re reaching, aren’t you?
BTW, yahoo is a paid directory. Its worth paying for for but it still is a paid inclusion. If RentClicks let their membership slip, so goes their listing.
…and speaking of spending less on advertising. RentClicks was a small company with aggressive, nimble marketing tactics competing at ground level with HomeRentalsAds and RentalHouses. They were able to find niches and opportunities and were singularly focused on one website, one business and one set of competitors. Imagine aquiring 3 websites while trying rebuilding another and trying to maintain 4 other unrelated websites. Can’t say it sounds lightweight. I’d bet there’s big company plans being worked out in long, executive meetings where lots of people with acronyms in their titles are discussing at great lengths the best way to go about addressing the fact that they have to deal with the situation they’ve created by not considering the ramifications of the actions they took before they understood the scope of the challenges they’d face when they acted on impulsive decisions made without consideration for the strategy that should have been addressed in the first place.
Spanky,
From your comment above:
“you are only showing the side of the story you want to show. Not fair, monsoir!”
Yes, you are so right I am spinning the blog post in my favor. I admit to that on my About Dave page. This blog serves several purposes for me - and hopefully providing a little entertainment to my readers is one of them.
If I upset any of my competitors on this blog I will gladly buy them a beer or two and apologize. Like I have said before I have a lot of respect for all of my competitors.
Spanky, do I need to buy you a beer?
Spanky,
RE: BTW, yahoo is a paid directory. Its worth paying for for but it still is a paid inclusion. If RentClicks let their membership slip, so goes their listing.
Rentclicks is not included in the non-paid organic listings….at all!
And my guess would be that Rentclicks never cared about Yahoo since they completely designed their site using virtual hostnames such as seattle.rentclicks.com. Even the ads get virtual hostnames which means they have thousands of virtual hostnames. Yahoo doesn’t like that and removes sites that do that.
And since they spent a ton of money last year to test market on television & radio then why wouldn’t they now pursue that? Do you think they did a test and decided just to not go forward with it?
I believe RC was dropped from Yahoo for violating some of Yahoo’s rules.
RC cared about Yahoo…….they want to be on the top of every major search engine possible as any Internet company would!
Ask any legitimate, conservative stock broker or investment professional their opinion on PRM and you probably already know what answer you’ll receive.
The charts were interesting. Yes, there are other opinions out there but it continues to amaze me that PRM still exists.
The question remains..Do you want this company in your portfolio for the long term ?
How much longer will PRM be around ?
Respectfully submitted,
Ru
Ru,
Will be interesting to see the first quarter earnings report due out in early May! Want to see how the small unit rental market ” family of sites”actually performed! Maybe it will even show how much PRM actually paid for Rentahouses.
If someone could check to see how much PRM paid for RentalHouses that would be great - I never know where to look in those reports.
Of course everyone knows that PRM sold about.com for 260 million less than what it paid for. Perhaps it would be no surprise to learn what PRM paid for RentalHouses.
Sincerely,
Ru
Wow, I didn’t know that - thanks for sharing.
That was in the Wall Street Journal i think February, 2004 or 05, i can’t recall. I saved that article but can’t find it right now.
PRM sold about to the NY Times. They purchased about when long forgotten Tom Rogers was ceo.
As i’ve mentioned earlier, i’m amazed the banks still allow this company to exist.
Sincerely,
Ru
RU,
Re : About.com
About.com Acquired by Primedia: Sin or Synergy?
by Barbara Quint
Posted On November 6, 2000
Primedia has announced its goal to dominate print and the Internet in its niche markets. It has made a number of deals recently with Internet and other media companies to improve its online position.
Primedia paid $690 million in stock for About.com. Initial negative market reaction led to a one-quarter loss in Primedia shares from their previous stock market value. About.com had no debt at the end of September and $133 million in cash. Its revenues in the latest quarter had risen by one-third over the previous quarter, and people at the company expected to see it make a profit by early next year.
In announcing the acquisition, Rogers compared the move to the Time Warner/America Online merger and said: “The Primedia and About merger creates the leading model for the integration of traditional and new media niche content and the resulting delivery of targeted marketing vehicles…
Turned out to be sin!