Alexa Watermarks Traffic Graphs

By Ekalavya B • April 3, 2007

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Alexa have watermarked all their traffic graphs as of today.

Eg:

Till yesterday (A traffic comparison between OkTataByeBye.com and Raahi.com :

Today:

Well what is Alexa?
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website (www.alexa.com) that provides information on the web traffic to other websites. Alexa collects information from users who have installed an "Alexa Toolbar," allowing them to provide statistics on web site traffic, as well as lists of related links.

Amazon and Statsoholic were having quite a few issues of late.

I’m quoting some snippets off TechCrunch’s coverage of the same:

Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) launched a year ago and provided much easier access to Alexa traffic data than the Alexa site itself. Statsaholic also had other features Alexa didn’t offer, like embeddable graphs and data smoothing. Others agreed, and soon started linking to Statsaholic instead of Alexa when doing traffic comparisons. At one point, Alexa was the no. 3 search result on Google for “Alexa.”

….That didn’t appease Amazon, which then took the step of blocking Statsaholic from accessing Alexa graphs, although they left other sites doing the same thing intact. Statsaholic started getting data in other ways, and eventually Amazon just turned off all ability to hot link to their graphs from any outside site.

Meanwhile, Amazon implemented many of the Statsaholic features and pushed the graphing function to the home page of the Alexa site.

Read more at - Amazon’s War on Statsoholic

Well Alexa with this step of watermarking want every one to know that - it is Alexa who is behind the statistics