• 12/14/2007 - ArtistServer News and a new site: FreeMusicLicensing.com
• 09/18/2007 - AritstServer and ToneThis Serve Up Indie Ringtones
• 09/11/2007 - Running LightTPD and PHP on Windows
• 09/06/2007 - Compete.com -vs- Alexa.com - Comparing Website Rank
• 08/29/2007 - HostMySite.com Limits ColdFusion, Does Not Tell Customers
• 08/14/2007 - New Song: Chocolate Rain - Sonic Remix
• 08/03/2007 - If You Use Open Source, Leave the License and Credit
• 07/31/2007 - Add Links to Profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and More
• 07/23/2007 - SocialNetwork.in API Promotes Cross Site Networking
• 07/22/2007 - AddToBookmarks.com Script Updated to Version 1.1

In the past, I've expressed my views about Alexa.com's data and the Web site stats they make available. While I'm sure they've worked to improve their data processing, and have hopefully dealt with the 'gaming' issues (where people would drive their rank up), I'm still unsure that the data is anything more than a generalized indicator for the Web.  Sites like AdBrite use your Alexa rank as a means to show advertisers your site's worth, and many top bloggers quote these same numbers when talking about sites.  Why? Because it's been around for five years, and it was the only option for such data.

Fortunately, good ideas spread, start-ups come to life, and usually improve the overall market by raising the bar. In the Web stats and comparison market, Alexa was joined by Compete.com (last year?), and we can at least compare data between the two services.

I'll leave it to you to visit compete.com to learn how they get their data. Alexa gets their from their browser toolbars.  Attention Firefox users... Alexa now has a toolbar for you too.

I think the best way to compare data between the two services is to look at a specific collection of sites which are in competition with each other - a single vertical market. Since I run a social music site (ArtistServer.com), I selected to compare my vertical as an example. Below, you'll see a table which lists most of my competitors, there are many more than this, although these are what I consider "music hosting services" that cater to artists/musicians, which is ArtistServer's focus.

What do you think? At first it would seems that as you move down in rank, that the numbers would have a greater variance, but that's not the case. The numbers simply jump around - for example, look at ReverbNation or Funender, how is it that their rankings are so different between Alexa and Compete?

I think if we can gain access to a third or fourth dataset from another service, the best thing to do would be to average their rankings together to give us a single ranking.  While the results would continue to just be an 'indicator' and not a real ranking, it might be a step in the right direction.

So - who is going to build the first Web Rank Aggregator? Or does it already exist?