It would be nice to see a second tab on that spreadsheet, without any filtering. In particular, I'm curious to see where reddit would rank on that list. It seems arbitrary and incorrect to consider them less of a startup than, say, DropBox.
Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
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Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#12It would be nice to see a second tab on that spreadsheet, without any filtering. In particular, I'm curious to see where reddit would rank on that list. It seems arbitrary and incorrect to consider them less of a startup than, say, DropBox.
I generally don't include companies that have exited. You can view the YC index here and download the data. The April version will be out soon. http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/the-y-combinator-inde...
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#13These are great and I look forward to you iterating on this - but I fear your over-reliance on Alexa is producing semi-worthless results. I can go into all of the reasons why Alexa data is unreliable but I assume you already know (the big one is selection bias based on who has the toolbar installed).
If you combine Alexa data w/ data from Quantcast, Statcounter and others, it would probably be valuable. But even Alexa themselves would tell you their dataset has massive holes in it when trying to use it as the foundation for this kind of thing.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#14These are great and I look forward to you iterating on this - but I fear your over-reliance on Alexa is producing semi-worthless results. I can go into all of the reasons why Alexa data is unreliable but I assume you already know (the big one is selection bias based on who has the toolbar installed). If you combine Alexa data w/ data from Quantcast, Statcounter and others, it would probably be valuable. But even Alex…
I hear you, and for the startup index we are now collecting 9 data points and v1 of the new one is a labor of love that I will hopefully have out in the next week or so. Iterating like a mofo :)
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#15I don't think growth in Alexa rank is a good metric, because it does not measure growth as typically defined (in %age increase in raw traffic). Unfortunately that makes the entire table mostly meaningless.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#16Earlier 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...
NewsBlur's #1 on the spreadsheet, which is crazy talk to me. I've been too busy scaling to even look at my analytics.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#17This work lacks grounding because the measure of interest, Alexa rank, is not situated in measures that are familiar.
The author, dmor, is not familiar with the semantics of the Alexa rank. Nor are most readers. We know loosely that low rank is good. But what does going from rank 1000 to 100 really mean? How hard is that? Is it a traffic increase of 10x? 100x? What exponential base does it follow?
So this chart shows the YC companies that have the largest Alexa rank delta. Frankly, the rankings look plain wrong to me, based upon what I know of these companies.
Other commentators have suggested that, given the power law distribution, we actually care about the delta log-rank. A priori, I would agree. But then we get a new ranked list, and we still don't know if we're actually learning something or our log-metric is messed up. That's actually quite pernicious, if the results look vaguely correct at a coarse level, so we trust the results at a fine-grained level, and don't realize that the methodology and results are wrong.
We're all just blowing hot air because we don't really know what Alexa ranks mean. Only SEOs who work with Alexa ranks frequently, understand the undocumented warts, and have a gut sense of what they mean, can interpret this.
But right now, we really have no point of reference and the table leaves us without having gained any insight.
Perhaps I'm actually happy that the results are so clearly wrong and not helpful. At least that way, no one will trust them. It would be much more insidious if the results were commonly thought to be instructive, but in fact were misleading.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
NewsBlur's #1 on the spreadsheet, which is crazy talk to me. I've been too busy scaling to even look at my analytics.
Well this is the kind of graph I dream about :)
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/newsblur.com#
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#19Can 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.)
And going from 300,000+ to 100,000 is orders of magnitude easier than going from 10,000 to 5,000.
#1 on this list went from 2xx,xxx to 2xx,xxx - that could seriously be just noise in the Alexa ranking methodology. That sites traffic could have even gone down slightly and still produced that result.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#20This work lacks grounding because the measure of interest, Alexa rank , is not situated in measures that are familiar. The author, dmor, is not familiar with the semantics of the Alexa rank. Nor are most readers. We know loosely that low rank is good. But what does going from rank 1000 to 100 really mean? How hard is that? Is it a traffic increase of 10x? 100x? What exponential base does it follow? So this chart show…
It sounds like the value may be in who is on the list and growing. Maybe the order is not as important as the fact that these are all companies worth watching?