Alexa vs Statsaholic

• Posted by B Jones on March 30th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

I am writing this concerning all the recent fuss about Alexa vs Statsaholic.com, which started because of Alexa’s decision to take action against Ron Hornbaker of Statsaholic.com (formerly Alexaholic.com) for several reasons, including continued use of the domain name Alexaholic.com.

David vs. Goliath - On March 18, in response to legal action taken against me by Alexa over the use of their name in my domain alexaholic.com, I changed the name of this website to Statsaholic. Now, on March 23, Amazon/Alexa is still trying to shut this website down, this time by blocking their traffic graphs if you’re viewing them from this site (even though thousands of other websites, and Alexa’s own free widgets, serve their traffic graphs in exactly the same manner). I’m doing my best to keep the site up with some creative coding, but it’s not looking good for the little guy here. If you see a white box where the graph should be, that’s Alexa blocking us again. It appears that the decision makers at Amazon think mashups and creative use of their api is fine, unless you get successful with it. (Ron Hornbaker of Statsaholic.com

I don’t know all of the details, but I can see why Alexa is upset. Someone starts a site called Alexaholic that really basically just scrapes Alexa’s graph content and repackages it. I suppose I’d be upset too.

Hornbaker also wrote about the situation in a recent blog post:

Why hasn’t Alexa made the graphs part of their official API and charged per request? They’ve done it with their website thumbnail images, and with data, but why not with the graphs? I would be their FIRST CUSTOMER for such a service, as long as it was priced appropriately. I’m already paying them several hundred dollars each month for data, and would gladly pay for graphs. The fact that they haven’t charged for them, and allow any website in the world (except mine) to link to them, says to me that they only mind hotlinking if the hotlinker becomes successful. Which should give every Amazon/Alexa api developer pause for thought.

Someone Please correct me if I’m wrong here, but I don’t see anything about Statsaholic that even uses AWS (amazon web services). Maybe he’s using AWS for the thumbnails, but I seriously doubt that’s what people come to Statsaholic for.

Edit: Alexa’s official blog clearly confirms that Statsaholic is NOT using the API.

Mr. Hornbaker is in fact not using our web service to generate the traffic graphs on his website. Instead of obtaining the traffic data for a fee using the API which Alexa offers, he has chosen to pirate proprietary Alexa data by taking Alexa traffic graphs without permission. (from Alexa’s Blog)

I first heard about this situation via this article that was (sort of) popular on Digg last week, which defends Hornbaker and Statsaholic.com.

Statsholic had started the comprehensive trafic comparison features much before Alexa itself (using Alexa’s own data). But it seems like Amazon’s API’s are not as open as they advertise it to be.

Really? Statsaholic started the comprehensive traffic comparison features before Alexa? Are you kidding me? Come on people!

Hornbaker didn’t invent Alexa! All he did was make a nice AJAX front end to Alexa’s existing graphing application.

Hornbaker, and many other web developers know all of the variables that Alexa’s graphing Application takes:

w = width of the graph
h = height
r = time span
y = daily reach (r) or rank (t)
a = ( 1 or 0) show or don’t show Alexa credit at botom of graph
z = smoothing of graph
u = website to get graph for (add more sites (u) to show comparison graph).

Add those variables to the url http://traffic.alexa.com/graph? and you get this. (I’m sure Alexa made it simple on purpose so that people could do what I just did.)

So is Alexa in the right?

I think ALexa definitly has reason to be pissed. Imagine that you have a neighbor wants to borrow a small pot full of gravel for his plants. You don’t mind, because you have a huge lot full of gravel, but when your neighbor comes driving up with a dump truck to get your gravel, and start his own gravel store, it definitely becomes an issue.

Still, I think Alexa is really overreacting. They should be trying to hire Hornbaker, not sue him. Alexa did try to but Statsaholic:

We even explored an acquisition, which we didn’t have to do. Unfortunately, it became clear over time that Mr. Hornbaker did not want to stop trading off the Alexa name.

But I guess Hornbaker wasn’t interested.

Again, I don’t know all the facts of this situation, but I do know that when you have an outside developer making a more popular user interface than yours, you’re doing something wrong.

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