• 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?

Yes, I'm still here - I've been bypassing the blog for more than a month now, and it's time to get back into it again.

Let's begin with some stats and data for any of you out there that are curious as to how well ArtistServer.com did in 2006. I spent this morning pulling data from various places and have compiled a comprehensive look at ArtistServer - covering traffic, revenue, visitors, mp3 stats, and more. Certainly, there's room for improvement and growth, but the numbers aren't bad considering there aren't any full-time employees, nor funding, and we stopped advertising in June 2006.

This year will be interesting, as I see us growing at a faster rate than in 2006. We'll need to upscale again, adding more storage, 2+ additional servers, and moving to a load-balanced solution.

In terms of new tools and features on the site, I plan to add Video hosting (most likely partnering with VideoEgg.com), expanding the Photo tools and options (like adding RSS feeds for photos), offering 'widgets,' and finally building out the mobile version of the site (which has been in beta for a year now).

I hope 2007 will bring some opportunities for ArtistServer, and the platform it runs on, SocialNetworkServer. I spent the last few months of 2006 talking to some people about launching a company around the platform. Unfortunately, the potential investor wasn't the right person, and the team that was forming has had difficulty getting all on the same page. Fortunately, nothing was signed, I still owning full rights to the platform, and I found out this was the wrong situation before it went too far. The good thing about the experience, is that I finally sat down and wrote out the whole plan for my platform including 20+ diagrams, which will make it easier to get things rolling on the next potential investment.

Ok - on with the stats!

Hopefully the formatting isn't too messy... if it is, and you are viewing this in your RSS reader, try viewing it on my blog instead.

Totals for 2006
===================================
Total Unique Visitors: 316,241
Total Pageviews: 1,271,169

Registrations (2006)
===================================
January 	684
February 	544
March 		625
April 		601
May 		532
June 		420
July 		482
August 		479
September 	498
October 	539
November 	513
December 	517


Total Account Upgrades
===================================
50

ArtistServer Revenue
===================================
Upgrades	+1,907
AdSense		+1,000
Donations	+138
Adwords		-525
Equip		-500
Colo/Bandwidth	-5,700
----------------------
Total: -$3,680


Top 10 Member Country (2001-2006)
===================================
United States 	9,342 	41.35%
United Kingdom  2,174  	 9.62%
Canada  	1,168  	 5.17%
Germany  	774  	 3.43%
Australia  	571  	 2.53%
Brazil  	392  	 1.74%
France  	343  	 1.52%
Poland  	313  	 1.39%
Sweden  	304  	 1.35%
India  		287  	 1.27%


Top 10 Countries by Visit (2006)
================================
United States	116,153
United Kingdom	34,358
Germany		17,166
Canada		15,529
France		8,372
Netherlands	7,854
Australia 	5,925
Japan 		5,803
Italy 		5,694
Norway		5,602


Top Pages visited by Unique Views (2006)
================================
http://www.artistserver.com/index.cfm		112,568
http://www.artistserver.com/music.cfm		39,172
http://www.artistserver.com/charts.cfm		15,487
http://www.artistserver.com/area.cfm/area/1	11,923
http://www.artistserver.com/genreview.cfm	9,894
http://www.artistserver.com/join/index.cfm	9,068
http://www.artistserver.com/artists.cfm		6,948
http://www.artistserver.com/ringtones/index.cfm	5,571
http://www.artistserver.com/gallery/index.cfm	4,444
http://www.artistserver.com/area.cfm/area/9	3,613	


Top 5 Web Browsers by Visits (2006)
================================
Internet Explorer	199,811
Firefox			87,409
Safari			12,144
Opera			8,766
Mozilla			3,905


Screen Resolution by Visits (2006)
================================
1024x768	160,732
1280x1024	58,603
800x600		32,048
1280x800	15,741
1152x864	14,115


Connection Speed by Visits (2006)
================================
Cable/DSL	231,425
Dialup		33,770
Unknown		31,970
Corporate	19,075


Stream/Downloads (2006)
===================================
These totals do not contain the data for songs that were deleted during the year.

January
Total Downloads:  	8,771
Total HiFi Streams: 	29,576
Total LoFi Streams: 	1,363

February
Total Downloads:  	7,040
Total HiFi Streams: 	24,477
Total LoFi Streams: 	2,194

March
Total Downloads:  	17,575
Total HiFi Streams: 	29,467
Total LoFi Streams: 	2,427

April
Total Downloads:  	11,827
Total HiFi Streams: 	27,034
Total LoFi Streams: 	2,054

May
Total Downloads:  	18,200
Total HiFi Streams: 	25,427
Total LoFi Streams: 	2,002

June
Total Downloads:  	12,657
Total HiFi Streams: 	20,568
Total LoFi Streams: 	1,656

July
Total Downloads:  	10,248
Total HiFi Streams: 	21,209
Total LoFi Streams: 	1,328

August
Total Downloads:  	12,279
Total HiFi Streams: 	23,445
Total LoFi Streams: 	668

September
Total Downloads:  	12,348
Total HiFi Streams: 	24,820
Total LoFi Streams: 	988

October
Total Downloads:  	18,646
Total HiFi Streams: 	29,463
Total LoFi Streams: 	1,485

November
Total Downloads:  	19,423
Total HiFi Streams: 	28,992
Total LoFi Streams: 	1,691

December
Total Downloads:  	18,662
Total HiFi Streams: 	28,103
Total LoFi Streams: 	2,753

Click here for a chart of additional data.

If you are going to republish my stats somewhere, please let me know.

Google Analytics Opens to Everyone - No Invitation Required

Google announced today that the popular Google Analytics is now instantly available to the public. No more waiting for invitation codes. Anyone with a website can now install the website tracking tool by directly signing up at the Google Analytics homepage, or by clicking through the "Analytics" tab in any Google AdWords account. It is not required to have a Google Adwords account to run Google Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics/

If your site receives a fair amount of traffic, and you currently attempt to process your log files, you should definately consider Google Analytics. Sign up, drop in the javascript from Google, and turn off your web logs. If you need the log data right away for some form of testing, you can always turn it back on.

After their tracking script is on all your site's pages, you'll gain access to far more than stats. You'll have charts, you'll have the ability to track goal pages, get reccomendations on search terms for your ads, you'll see where people enter and exit your site, how long they vist, and more.

Let a month or two pass, then dive into the tools they provide for analyzing your data. With a little time and effort, you'll learn a lot about your site, including what's working, and what pages need reworking.

As you can imagine, it gets more interesting once you get more than six months or so worth of data in their system. The hard part, is figuring out how to digest and reapply what you learn from the many charts and tables Google Analytics presents you.

ArtistServer.com has always provided a realtime view into the data we track for song streams and downloads. Artists and Bands can select a time range of month or year, select the actual month and year, and click to view. The site would then generate a table of data showing you what kind of activity happend, sorted by date. While this is very useful information, it's not easily digested. Not many people want to look at lists of dates and numbers - they simply want the bottom line, they want to see the spectrum, and they want to see what's hot.

To help make our stats tool more useful to artists and bands, we've JUST launched an upgrade on the site.

Artists, signin to ArtistServer - click on the MyAccount button, then under the "My Account" item in the menu, select "Stats: My Music"

OR if you are already signed in - just click this link:
www.artistserver.com/index.cfm/adminarea/13

Once there, you will see we've added 3 interactive Flash Charts to your stats.

A Pie - A scatter chart - and a line chart.

The pie and scatter chart show you all your songs by 'hit' - which is the total activity for that song. By total activity, the site means: streams, download, lofi streams and ringtone downloads.

The line chart shows you your total activity over time. This chart is totaling up all the activity across all your songs per each day.

Each of these are 'interactive' on ArtistServer - when you move your mouse over them, you see the song names and associated data.

Here are some screenshots of the charts - I have a lot of songs on the site, so your pie may not be as sliced up as this one is.

If you are an artist or in a band, and you want charts and data like this, click on over to ArtistServer and give the site a try, you'll discover what you've been missing.

Just in case you were not aware, Alexa is not a valid means of comparing sites - it's some form of an indicator, but should in no way be considered for solid conclusions or judgements on how popular/busy a site is.

The Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Plus - it's a system that people 'game.' Here are some links that cover the subject in more detail.

Alexa Totally Unreliable? — Business Logs
http://businesslogs.com/reviews/alexa_totally_unreliable.php

Why Alexa Ranking Alone is Worthless : SEO Book.com
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000034.shtml

Faking Alexa traffic ranking
http://www.techdigger.com/faking-alexa-traffic-ranking/

Manipulating Alexa Traffic Rankings
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3044

And how about this gem... http://www.alexasurf.com/

Alexa Surf provides webmasters with a way to boost your Alexa Rank. This is free for anyone who wishes to Increase your Alexa Ranking for Free.

Are you looking for top rankings on alexa.com? If so then you have come to the right place! Alexabooster has been boosting thousands of sites for over 3 years!

Using the alexabooster software can boost your ranking anywhere from 100K or better! Alexabooster is a simple 3 step software that runs hidden in your sytem tray.

And as I thought about it, I realized that Alexa has become a critical tool for me as I try to understand what's really happening on the Internet.

Whenever someone tells me about a web service, one of the first things I do is run an Alexa search on it, find out its traffic, what kind of people use it, etc.

Here is another influential VC blogger that seems to rely on Alexa: http://www.genuinevc.com/archives/2005/11/tracking_traffi.htm

What are people seeing in the charts - is it real data, is it the site owner and all his friends boosting their site - is it a room of computers set to refresh and browse a site all day every day with the toolbar on? How would you know?

Should you care? YES!

I think it's getting to be time to expose how bad this is by having a bunch of people pick a random site each month - and have those people use the techniques for abusing the system to send that sit up the ranking. If the system is as poor as it seems, we should be able to manipulate the results and place the chose site near the top - at least in the under 100,000 range. Even better - we could put up a bogus site with a domain - and run it as the testing ground since it would start fresh with no data in the Alexa system.

Why challenge the Alexa Ranking?

Because we desperately need data like this - we need charts - we want to compare... and we use Alexa because it seems like the best thing out there. Which is why people are building and launching sites like http://www.alexaholic.com/ - a site I was just reading about over at Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/alexaholic-get-your-alexia-stats-fix/

I can understand why the developer built the site, but I'm also troubled that someone who is obviously smart and intelligent would get behind such a broken system without posting anything on his site about it. Although... that would cut down on the uptake of his service - or maybe he doesn't know how there's a whole scene built around manipulating Alexa. Chances are, it's just the developer meeting a need and figuring it's the best thing out there and people want it. Which is ok, that's a developer's job.

I just have a hard time with cheating, and when you realize that cheating is going on in a system, and others rely on that system and do not realize the level of manipulation, it's a sad situation. False perceptions based on false data which in turn ripple out into other forms of falsehood is a receipe for disaster.

What could work better?

I'm not sure if it's possible, but I was thinking if Google Analytics could provide a feed of your traffic, that a 3rd party site could be setup that would allow people to register their traffic feeds and have that data analyzed against the whole collection. There's still a chance of people gaming their systems - but that could be dealt with to some degree on the analyzing side. Just check IPs and look for abuse patterns - which could be done through code and flag sites that seem to be generating fake traffic.

Or Google could just get some code together and simply add an option in Google Analytics you could check off that would merge your data into a pool for anaylzing and generating a Google Analytics account for 'the Web' - which would allow us to view data across all participants (limited view ofcourse).

Until the day comes that someone can provide a system that fixes the holes Alexa provides, we have to accept that there isn't a means for comparing a Website against another unless both sites provide their data untouched for analyzing to an unbiased 3rd party.