Amazon Files Lawsuit on Statsaholic
It’s no secret that I believe Alexa is flawed at its core. However, that doesn’t change my disappointment that Alexa (hence Amazon) has chosen to sue one of their biggest fans.

Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) truly believes that the data is useful. Since I have access to 3rd party research and a company to pay for it, I have zero use for Alexa data. The only “endorsement” that I will give is that if you can’t afford a 3^rd party research tool, Alexa is better than nothing.

This isn’t about whether Alexa’s data is any good or not. It’s about why a company with an adoring fan would choose to slap them right in the face: Here’s the glowing endorsement that Ron Hornbaker provides for them:

1. Alexa is currently the best source for free and public comparative Web user traffic data.
2. Newbies with the Alexa Toolbar are not the only source of data. Firefox users with Craig Raw's cool SearchStatus extension should note that their browsing behavior is similarly being phoned-home to Alexa, and included in the statistics you see here.
3. Statistical significance is attainable with only a small subset of the population – ask a pollster or a high school math teacher.
4. Alexa's blazing-fast graph rendering engine absolutely rocks. Think about the mountains of data Alexa is working with on the backend, and all the possible permutations of graph content and size that prevent widespread caching, and I think you'll agree that their engineers brought their A-game to this one.
5. The key is "comparative" traffic data. If you want to know exactly how many page views and visitors your site is getting, get a good webserver log analysis tool. But if you want to quickly compare your site's traffic to your competitors' sites' traffic, Alexa is your friend.

So why did Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) choose to bite his friend? The only way Statsaholic’s backing could be any stronger is if they included a link to download the Alexa toolbar. Both companies seemed to have a good, symbiotic relationship.

Statsaholic is not affiliated with Alexa.com, but depends on them exclusively for the traffic chart images. Fortunately for me, Alexa is a cool company that has historically been supportive of 3rd-party development like the excellent Alexadex.com. According to this Alexa blog article calling Statsaholic "cool", they apparently approve of my efforts. I hope you like it, too.

Could Statsaholic have been ANY clearer???? And that "cool company" Alexa (according to their blog) didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

Hornbaker admits to changing the name of the site (and the URL—which appears to be wasted at this point) in March to avoid the trademark issue. And that absolutely makes sense from a brand protection standpoint (if these two were competitors). But the site provides other tools than just the Alexa aggregated data…so that seems pretty convenient.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but in my mind, this should have been dealt with more diplomatically. Considering the strong relationship these companies had, how does Bezos treat his enemies?

Labels: Alexa, lawsuit, Statsaholic

Jeremy | permalink | +marktd |