Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
daniellemorrill.com
Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#2This is cool and all, but you probably want to compare April of this year to April of last year (and previous years). My company (Virtualmin, 76 on the list) has pretty big fluctuations throughout the year, with early months (specifically January) being the best, and December being the worst. So, if you were to compare December to January for us, you'd see a huge spike upward...but if you compared January to February, you'd see a small drop downward (and that trend might even continue throughout the year...though it seems to not be happening that way between March and April).
I'm just saying this is a pretty limited view of these sites, and it'd be difficult to draw useful conclusions from it. Our traffic probably isn't growing faster than more recent YC companies, even if we show up above them on the list. We're a pretty stable entity at this point. Not to say I didn't get a kick out of seeing our numbers getting better at a pretty rapid clip, even knowing more detail about what our traffic actually looks like.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#3Comparing absolute change in Alexa rank seems fundamentally broken to me. It weights massively to early companies.
Snipshot's rank rose by nearly 80,000 - that's undeniably good, but 37 of the companies on the list had a previous rank of less than 80,000...
I would suggest comparing the delta of the log of rank, this gives a more interesting (to me) metric...
For example this bumps Newsblur up from a "meh" 23 to 1! And AnyPerk from an exciting 6 down to a not so cool (unless you like catches) 22 (not picking on AnyPerk, it's just the most demoted of the original top 10)
Under this change of methodology the biggest winner is WorkFlowy from 61->24, biggest loser's are Circle (39-67); FundersClub (40-68); and Cloudant (44-72)
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#4This is cool and all, but you probably want to compare April of this year to April of last year (and previous years). My company (Virtualmin, 76 on the list) has pretty big fluctuations throughout the year, with early months (specifically January) being the best, and December being the worst. So, if you were to compare December to January for us, you'd see a huge spike upward...but if you compared January to February…
I absolutely agree with you regarding seasonality, I simply don't have a snapshot from a year ago. But a year from now I will be able to do this now that I am collecting the data each month.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#5Comparing absolute change in Alexa rank seems fundamentally broken to me. It weights massively to early companies. Snipshot's rank rose by nearly 80,000 - that's undeniably good, but 37 of the companies on the list had a previous rank of less than 80,000... I would suggest comparing the delta of the log of rank, this gives a more interesting (to me) metric... For example this bumps Newsblur up from a "meh" 23 to 1! A…
Presumably, the sites on Alexa follow a power law (based on traffic), so deltas on log-rank would indeed make a lot of sense. Of course... the data itself is quite interesting. Mad props to Danielle for compiling all of it -- this makes running our own quick calcs that much easier.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#6Comparing absolute change in Alexa rank seems fundamentally broken to me. It weights massively to early companies. Snipshot's rank rose by nearly 80,000 - that's undeniably good, but 37 of the companies on the list had a previous rank of less than 80,000... I would suggest comparing the delta of the log of rank, this gives a more interesting (to me) metric... For example this bumps Newsblur up from a "meh" 23 to 1! A…
Presumably, the sites on Alexa follow a power law (based on traffic), so deltas on log-rank would indeed make a lot of sense. Of course... the data itself is quite interesting. Mad props to Danielle for compiling all of it -- this makes running our own quick calcs that much easier.
I considered it but was on the fence so I wasn't going to use log this first time, but it sounds like that really might be the best approach. Give me a minute and I'll make a spreadsheet you guys can check out to see if it makes more sense.
UPDATE: Here you go! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdGM...
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#7Can you sort by the delta in monthly pageviews? Absolute change in rank offers little meaningful information. (I would assume is much easier to go from 10,000 to 5,000 than 200 to 100.)
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#8This is cool and all, but you probably want to compare April of this year to April of last year (and previous years). My company (Virtualmin, 76 on the list) has pretty big fluctuations throughout the year, with early months (specifically January) being the best, and December being the worst. So, if you were to compare December to January for us, you'd see a huge spike upward...but if you compared January to February…
I absolutely agree with you regarding seasonality, I simply don't have a snapshot from a year ago. But a year from now I will be able to do this now that I am collecting the data each month.
Thanks for putting this together.
Also if you can't get your hands on the data from 2012 maybe taking the launch date vs their current Alexa position and averaging this out to see their Alexa growth over their lifespan. That would be really nice to see.
Thanks again.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#9I like most of your lists and creativity, but this one isn't very helpful and it feels like you're reaching. After a site cracks the Alexa top 10,000, it becomes a lot harder to move up and should be worth a lot more on rankings.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably, the sites on Alexa follow a power law (based on traffic), so deltas on log-rank would indeed make a lot of sense. Of course... the data itself is quite interesting. Mad props to Danielle for compiling all of it -- this makes running our own quick calcs that much easier.
I considered it but was on the fence so I wasn't going to use log this first time, but it sounds like that really might be the best approach. Give me a minute and I'll make a spreadsheet you guys can check out to see if it makes more sense. UPDATE: Here you go! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdGM...
App store rank to download volume follows a power curve almost exactly, I think it's safe to assume similar here. I was going to make the same recommendation as beambot.