What Should Bloggers Use Instead of Alexa to Discuss Rates with Advertisers?

There’s a very interesting post on CenterNetworks today full of righteous indignation against Alexa and the way it has recently lowered rankings for numerous blogs. In fact, I have noticed that myself for Profy but decided not to bother because we have never relied on Alexa to measure our traffic.

The assumption is that Alexa changed the algorithm not to take traffic coming from social media and social news sites into account - and Andy Beard has a number of interesting thoughts that seem to prove just that. It now very much looks like Alexa simply stopped looking at the traffic from social media sites like Digg or StumbleUpon at all.

The major problem (and the reason for people to care about this latest decision - or whatever it is that brought our rankings this much lower) is that some bloggers still use Alexa charts in their talks with advertisers. And they still track Alexa rankings every day filling Twitter streams with exclamations like “Hurray, Alexa ranking of…” hoping we will all admire their great achievements.

It has always astonished me that people actually used these figures for anything since whenever you hear Alexa mentioned in a blog post, it is most certainly about how inaccurate Alexa and its algorithm are. But those bloggers still stick to Alexa for some reason to determine popularity of their blogs and even to use them when negotiating rates with advertisers.

But what we see now is depressing for those same bloggers because you will hardly ever find blogs that do not depend on social media traffic. Even if a blog owner is not a traffic whore and does not run around begging for diggs and votes on Reddit or elsewhere when their post is submitted (and I hereby admit that I do) this blog still depends on those sites to send traffic.

True, this traffic may be rather natural: the blog may simply have a very loyal audience that is perfectly willing to submit posts everywhere without the blog owner suggesting that and this will result in traffic that may seem to be natural but is still generated by social media sites.

Alexa has chosen not to confirm or deny anything on its blog for now but hopefully we will at least get some explanation in the comments on any of the blogs that discussed the problem - at least maybe the prospects of getting sued by website owners will help get a word out about how the algorithm really works and why the rankings have been cut so heavily.

But no matter how true the assumption that the rankings don’t take social media traffic into account any more, one thing is evident: blogs generally rely heavily on social media for traffic and influence with various social media and social voting sites may be much more important for blogs than search engine optimization is.

And I think the main problem with blogs that talk to advertisers based on the traffic charts - no matter if they come from Alexa or Compete (that I personally find to be more reliable). We should all realize (and make the advertisers realize as well) that blogs are not about traffic and sponsoring blogs is not about traffic, it’s about reputation and regular metrics are not really applicable here.

When an advertiser sponsors a blog, this advertiser rarely buys traffic, it is more for branding and to associate the brand with an influential name in the blogosphere. After all, if a company wants traffic, it will be much better off buying clicks on AdWords (or with any other CPC network) because in this arrangement the company will pay only for those clicks that they actually receive. But when a company buys a monthly sponsorship on a blog, it is not offered any guarantees that people will click through. What is guaranteed instead is that the readers will see the banner of the product and will associate the brand with the blog - and if the content on this blog makes them visit regularly, they will subconsciously associate the brand with high quality.

I believe this is exactly why some blogs even now mention their Technorati authority instead of traffic to demonstrate the value of sponsoring their blogs to advertisers. Technorati authority matters because it proves that this or that blog has a distinct voice that other bloggers want to hear and refer to.

The same is true for social media. Influence of a blog on social media sites means that it has an audience loyal enough to help the blog prosper and get its traffic. And probably this loyal audience will be benevolent to sponsors of the blog as well and even willing to buy their services as recommended by this particular blog.

This is why I think that we already need a new tool to track this influence and allow us to talk to advertisers based on this influence instead of traffic charts. This ideal tool should work pretty similarly to Technorati but instead of counting incoming links from other blogs it should rely on social media links as well and take into account the number of votes and comments a blog gets on all the social media sites. As a result this tool could calculate ranks for all the blogs based on their influence with social media (and it could work even better combined with other metrics like Technorati authority as well).

We already see the rudiments for such a tool with services like AideRSS that help bloggers see how their posts perform on Google Reader, Delicious, Digg, and Twitter. The next logical step will be to add other services and calculate global rankings for blogs based on their influence among those social media services supported.

Frankly, I hate all types of ranks or top 100 lists myself but I believe that such a tool that could help everyone understand how influential this or that blog is could be very helpful - at least to talk to advertisers. And in my opinion such a tool would have been more meaningful than anything Alexa can offer. So if anyone actually comes up with a tool like this, I will be the first one to support it on this blog and everywhere on the social media sites where people will be willing to listen.

Full disclosure: Profy runs CPM ads served by Technorati Media, the advertising network recently launched by Technorati.