Trading Places

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know that I am fascinated with web traffic statistics. After all, what’s the point of putting a site out there if not to have people visit it? There are lots of ways to measure traffic, lots of ways to slice and dice the numbers, and lots of companies out there offering to do it for you. My favorite is Google Analytics, but there’s a lot to be said for the ranking service offered by Alexa.

A while back, I offered my gut-level observation that Seattle’s thereviewboard.net is in decline and on it’s way towards sleeping with the fishes. Now I have some numbers from Alexa that show I wasn’t too far off the mark. Here’s the graph (clickable, opens in new tab or window):

The trend is pretty clear — TRB has gone steadily downhill since CLRB was founded. After roughly 6 years, and being the only game in town for much of that time, TRB is currently drawing traffic roughly equivalent to what CLRB was able to pull in 3 months after launch. If you go to Alexa and look at the 3-month view, the news is even more grim for TahoeTed and his merry men — the usurper, TNA, is drawing three to four times the number of page views.

What does it all mean? Well, that depends on who you are. If you are set in your ways and prefer $250-400/hour providers that come from a limit pool of talent, then TRB is for you and everything is fine. If you are a hobbyist interested in viewing the best available research, it should be pretty clear where you are going to find it.

And, if you are a provider who wants to put her advertising in front of the maximum number of eyeballs, you now know where to do that. Maybe you don’t need me to tell you this… maybe you already know that anything posted on TNA will be seen by far, far more potential clients than if it were on TRB. Here’s the data that demonstrates that it wasn’t just a hunch.