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Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

daniellemorrill.com

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Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#21

Post by joshu »

dmor wrote: post #12
raldi wrote: post #11

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.

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...

Reddit unexited. They're an independent company now.

Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#22

Post by orangethirty »

I don't see how traction relates to traffic. Traction rates to financials. Traffic relates to momentum, which is more of a measure of visitors, and not of growth. Not a bad data set per we, either. I'd love to see this type of approach done with each company's growth, but I am sure most will shy away, including the YC founders.

Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#24

Post by gav »

dmor wrote: post #14
wilfra wrote: post #13

These 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 :)

It's a little old, but here's some notes from Reddit and their traffic vs. numbers from Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...

From my personal experience, the numbers from Alexa are complete gibberish.

Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#25

Post by dmor »

est wrote: post #23

The spreadsheet didn't include 9gag? http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/9gag.com http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/yc-demo-day-s12/

9gag's global traffic rank dropped from #328 to #329 in the sample period. The list does not include companies whose traffic went down, even if they are in the top 250,000 of all sites globally. I included an explanation of this in the post.

Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#26

Post by tomasien »

orangethirty wrote: post #22

I don't see how traction relates to traffic. Traction rates to financials. Traffic relates to momentum, which is more of a measure of visitors, and not of growth. Not a bad data set per we, either. I'd love to see this type of approach done with each company's growth, but I am sure most will shy away, including the YC founders.

Traction relates to financials - citation needed

Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#27

Post by dmor »

joshu wrote: post #21
dmor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Reddit unexited. They're an independent company now.

Yeah, they're sort of weird edge case but I can see a case for wanting to benchmark against them, let me think about it a bit.

Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#28

Post by bravura »

dmor wrote: post #20
bravura wrote: post #17

This 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?

Let me say first of all that I have great respect for the way you have engaged with criticism on this post and on your previous ones. Even when I disagree with your approach or whatever, I appreciate your curiosity and eagerness to learn.

Some ways that you could make weaker claims but with more confidence in your results:

* Have an unordered list of companies that are growing. This was your suggestion. I don't know how interesting that is.

* Group companies into five or ten buckets, based upon Alexa ranks. (i.e. 1=low traffic bucket, 5=high traffic) Find the top three movers-and-shakers within each bucket. This makes the weaker assumption that Alexa ranks deltas are comparable within each bucket, as opposed to your original assumption that they are comparable across the entire spectrum of Alexa ranks.

There are a handful of other things you can do that are more complicated. For example, if you can correlate Alexa ranks with Compete unique visitor estimates or some other number (company's exit value). Compete estimates are also biased, but at least people have better intuition of what unique visitor numbers mean.

Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#29

Post by il »

I think traffic for lists like these is something of a red herring. Small fluctuations for low-traffic sites are almost entirely a result of randomness or sampling error.

A better metric would be to divide the companies by traffic into nontrivial traffic(Alexa Rank<10,000) and trivial traffic for the rest. It would require some more research, but it would also be very helpful to separate consumer vs B2B companies and only compare consumer companies on traffic. Many of the companies on that list(including my company MixRank) appear to be doing quite poorly in terms of traffic until one realizes that each visitor to a B2B product is worth orders of magnitude more than a visitor to a consumer product.

Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth

#30

Post by tomasien »

Since everyone else seems to be finding a reason to be critical, I'll just say: I found this really interesting, and I'm glad you presented the data this way so that I could make my own analysis. It wasn't to say that #1 on the list had made the most progress (although who that was was surprising) but rather than these are the companies from YC that are growing in terms of traffic. Make of it what you will.

Quite interesting that Dropbox jumped an entire spot in a month for a non-content based site.

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