Amazon's War on Statsaholic - Be Careful If Your Business Model Relies Entirely on an API from One Company

techcrunch.com

7 points·joshwa··5 comments

I think it's time for Alexa to die. Their stats have always been a dangerously misleading source of data. Now they're behaving evilly too. If anyone wants to apply to YC with an idea for a replacement, we'd be excited to fund such a company.

Our submission focuses on this sort of data, but just not for all websites. We're looking to provide tracking and statistics for our target market.

It's pretty hard to gauge web traffic across the internet without facing selection bias problems like alexa. I'm just waiting for google to start releasing more traffic data, instead of just hoarding it. (ever wonder why/how analytics is free? Google's probably got the best web trend data in the world)

Google Analytics uses a small JavaScript (placed by the webmaster) on the page to be tracked. It's not as if Google has unfettered access to everyone's traffic data and secretly sits on it.

Well, no, obviously they don't have access to all data.

They only have traffic data for: What you search for, and in which sites you click on in the search results, everything about sites that use Google Analytics, and everything about every page that displays AdWords.

Not quite the same as Alexa, but I stand by my point.

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