"Disturbing mystery affecting your favorite news sites"

Those who run watchdog news websites are scratching their heads and trying to make sense of the latest data released by a California company that measures website traffic.

According to data for July through September, almost every major website – from WND to the Drudge Report and Breitbart – saw its rankings drop on Alexa.com while pro-government sites mostly went up.

The alternative sites note their stats were in fact on the rise during this precipitous drop in the ratings. Recently Alexa expanded its "global traffic panel," which may explain the change. The drops could harm sites' ability to attract advertisers.

Read more at www.wnd.com...

WND story

Didn't catch this news yet, thanks. An all the sudden drop/rise in other sites is suspect, possibly paid for and or influenced:

The source said some websites can “buy” a higher traffic rating from powerful social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

As shared in the OP source.

Wonder how ATS is doing, other sites like this.

a reply to: lindalinda

WND is run by the same bunch of far right freaks who published Todd "Legitimate Rape" Atkins' book. Drudge is a hub of disinformation and Brietbart and his successors have manufactured at least three stories that I can think of off the top of my head.

Alexa isn't exactly accurate.

In other "news" — far right website operators, much like the rest of their brethren at large, have massive persecution complexes.

If you have evidence that WND is not reporting this story accurately, please share it! Whether you agree with their politics or other stories and books is not the issue. Alexa isn't exactly accurate ... so you *do* agree?

originally posted by: theantediluvian
a reply to: lindalinda

WND is run by the same bunch of far right freaks who published Todd "Legitimate Rape" Atkins' book. Drudge is a hub of disinformation and Brietbart and his successors have manufactured at least three stories that I can think of off the top of my head.

Alexa isn't exactly accurate.

In other "news" — far right website operators, much like the rest of their brethren at large, have massive persecution complexes.

Good question. Looks like ATS is also way down.

www.alexa.com...

I doubt this is pay-for-play. To me it looks like deliberately manipulating the data to hurt their perceived enemies and help their perceived friends.

originally posted by: dreamingawake
Didn't catch this news yet, thanks. An all the sudden drop/rise in other sites is suspect, possibly paid for and or influenced:

The source said some websites can “buy” a higher traffic rating from powerful social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

As shared in the OP source.

Wonder how ATS is doing, other sites like this.

a reply to: lindalinda

To me it looks like deliberately manipulating the data to hurt their perceived enemies and help their perceived friends.

That's what they do best.

Jealousy reigns supreme !!

a reply to: lindalinda

I just looked at FoxNews, CNN, MSNBC for a glance. The graphs show the first two dropping while MSNBC is making a meteoric rise. Yep, sounds like a pay to play scheme to me.

It could not possibly be that people are simply over the extremes and are trying to find a middle ground media outlet that actually provides the news and not either parties spin on what the news means.

I know that personally I got so sick of being spoon fed someone elses editorialized and factionized version of "news" - from both sides - that I began getting all of mine directly from the raw AP source... And even there large grains of salt are often needed to sift opinion from fact.

originally posted by: lindalinda
Good question. Looks like ATS is also way down.

www.alexa.com...

I doubt this is pay-for-play. To me it looks like deliberately manipulating the data to hurt their perceived enemies and help their perceived friends.

originally posted by: dreamingawake
Didn't catch this news yet, thanks. An all the sudden drop/rise in other sites is suspect, possibly paid for and or influenced:

The source said some websites can “buy” a higher traffic rating from powerful social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

As shared in the OP source.

Wonder how ATS is doing, other sites like this.

Well, look at that, this site has been pretty active lately!

Help their friends, yup, considering MSM is loosing ratings, need net news to fall back on.

blog.alexa.com

We’re excited to announce that after a lot of hard work, the size of Alexa’s global traffic panel will be significantly increasing. Over the next month we’ll be incorporating lots of new data points, which will help improve the accuracy of our metrics. As a reminder, our data panel is a sample of global Internet traffic used to calculate Alexa ranks and estimate non-Certified metrics.

If they were using primarily USA data to rank sites and now they are using more data from other countries I'm not surprised that the site listings changed.

I'm guessing you didn't read the story. The sites that dropped in Alexa rankings did not see an actual drop in traffic, in fact they saw increases. So... I don't think so.

a reply to: Hefficide

One would not expect international audiences to boost the numbers of National Public Radio. Also the stats are broken down for US and global results, but I don't think they provide graphs for both (unless one subscribes, probably).

I thought maybe it was due to some sites' traffic being estimated and others being certified (so Alexa has direct access to their server traffic) but all the ones I checked are estimated.

a reply to: Elton