The Alexa toolbar I added to the ineffable Firefox generates a fair amount of ego-boosting. Really. Where else, this side of Snow White, can you gaze into a mirror and have it murmur sweet nothings back at you?
According to this sweet cooing program, Funny is busting its seams with fattening popularity. (If only Adsense would get the message!) When I signed on to Alexa, sometime around the first of the month, Funny’s ranking was around 235,000. None of this striking me as very important, I didn’t note either the day or the exact figure. But there you have the same general idea as I do.
Fifteen days later, the ranking has risen to 170,881, easily busting through Yakezie’s challenge goal. (See, 1 is high, 87 gerjillion is low. Yakezie’s challenge is to break into the 100,000 range, assuming you’re one of the gerjillion.) According to my exquisitely sensitive calculations, Funny’s Alexa ranking increases at an average rate of 4,813 points a day.
Exciting, isn’t it?
Well, it would be, if we had a clue whether it has any meaning outside of Technoville.
We’re told we must jack up our rankings if we wish to monetize our site, because advertisers, for unknown reasons, attach high significance to Alexa rankings. And maybe Google uses Alexa in its rankings.
But what is it, anyway? Wikipedia reports that some folks classify it as a form of spyware or adware, possibly not something one would like knowingly to install in one’s system. I don’t know about that…and hope it’s not so, now that it’s lurking among the too-many-toolbars at the top of my screen. The thing is heavily skewed toward webmasters, the highly techie group that originated it and forms its base: apparently most people who have the toolbar installed are webmasterish. And even that set expresses some skepticism about its significance. But they swear that advertisers commonly use it as a gauge of how many viewers might see their pitches.
And it’s apparently pretty easy to game Alexa. If, that is, one wanted to diddle away a lot of one’s hours at such an activity, an activity about as meaningful as a game of Spider Solitaire.
Well, it does seem to me that if Alexa had a direct line to Google, Adsense revenues would rise in lockstep with Alexa. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. Not that I’m not grateful for the ego boost! Just sayin’, is all…
