"Playing with Alexa" today, I stumbled across a fairly striking case of cannibalization... Many may remember that on May 8, 2006 Gabe Rivera's popular Memeorandum site spun out it's technology section as TechMeme. It is well known that Techmeme has been successful in rapidly gaining a very respectable readership. But, what may not be as well known is that much of Techmeme's gain seems to have been at the direct cost of its parent --- Memeorandum. The "Alexa Rank" chart below tells the tale in graphic detail.
As Gabe mentions in the blog post announcing Techmeme, he wanted to create a more easily remembered URL for the site. (TechMeme is certainly easier to spell and say than "tech-dot-MEME-o-randum".) Thus, we shouldn't be too surprised that so much traffic was swept away. The launch of TechMeme worked like a renaming of part of the Memeorandum site. Memeorandum continues to run with non-tech content -- but seems to be losing readers over time -- while TechMeme is holding steady in the numbers...
It is somewhat disappointing to see that readership for the now non-technical Memeorandum has dropped so much and continues to fade. What we may see here is another example of a common problem: Techies deploy wonderful technologies for keeping up to date on news, but find that there users are limited to other techies trying to keep up to date on technical stuff...
bob wyman
Hi Bob. Actually, the site now known as Techmeme isn't cannibalizing the site now known as memeorandum at all, and never has. Both are growing, not shrinking.
But it is true that Techmeme moving from tech.memeorandum.com to techmeme.com has decreased overall accesses to the memeorandum.com domain, which is what that Alexa measures.
Why the apparent ongoing memeorandum.com decline? It follows from people changing their bookmarks to reflect the new domain, a process that takes months. Alexa also exaggerates this effect, as it tends to exaggerate traffic to most techy sites. In fact, memeorandum traffic is 60% of Techmeme's traffic, something definitely not reflected in Alexa.
[Bob Wyman responds: Gabe, thanks for the additional detail! If I understand you correctly, you're saying that technical folk are more likely to use Alexa than are non-technical folk. Thus, as the technical folk shift their bookmarks to TechMeme, Alexa reports a disproportionate drop in the number of visitors to tech.memeorandum... That makes sense.
Of course, we've now got another interesting question to deal with: How accurate is Alexa data and are its biases well known? I know a great many people rely on Alexa to give them an accurate view of web activity, yet I also know of many cases where folk who manage web sites are convinced that the Alexa data is inaccurate. This is disappointing, of course.
I wonder how many business plans for "non-techie" sites have been weakened by folk looking at the techie-heavy Alexa numbers and extrapolating them to the general marketplace?]
Posted by: Gabe | September 20, 2006 at 18:00
Bob, this subject does come up from time to time. Probably the best recent post is from David Galbraith:
http://www.davidgalbraith.org/archives/001165.html
Try also Googling for "alexa tech skew"
Posted by: Gabe | September 20, 2006 at 19:21
How does either meme site make money?
Posted by: Mike B | September 20, 2006 at 19:47