October '04 Alexa rankings

Inspired by this post from Cewebrity, I thought I'd do a little research to see where in the grand scheme of the Information Superhighway the sites that have been lucky enough to receive links from me stand traffic-wise.

Rank      Site                                                         Alexa Rank
1              The Onion                                                  3,453
2             Maddox                                                      7,053
3             Television Without Pity                          7,968
4             Gawker                                                      10,107
5             Defamer                                                    21,559
6             Tucker Max                                             26,185
7             Gothamist                                                 31,702
8             X-Entertainment                                    47,133
9             Curbed                                                      71,329
10             New Yorkish                                           99,017
11             Whatevs                                                  120,025
12             Low Culture                                           157,177
13             TMFTML (defunct)                             248,160
14             Lockhart Steele                                     289,841
15             Lindsayism                                             328,514
16             Aaron Karo                                             331,160
17             Choire Sicha                                           395,124
18             Jessica Cohen                                        569,312
19             Bunsen                                                     733,756
20             Tale of Two Cities                                841,486
21             Night in the Big City                            947,040
22             Elizabeth Spiers                                1,040,969
23             Marty Beckerman                              1,688,542
24             Ned Vizzini                                         4,038,486
25             Hakushaku                                           (no rank)
26             Jen Chung                                            (no rank)
27             Ian MacBlog                                          No data
28             The Impulsive Buy                               No data
29             The Kristin Buckley Show                  No data
30             Misadventures of Jer                           No data
31             Petroleum Jelliffe                                  No data
32             Pop Culture Magazine (defunct)      No data
33             This Is What We Do Now                   No data

At first glance the rankings seem pretty accurate, although there were a few eyebrow-raisers. The Onion and Maddox at 1 and 2 seems about right, although I had no idea Television Without Pity had gotten that popular. Possibly the biggest surprise is that Tucker Max gets more traffic than Gothamist. I guess going the asshole route really can pay dividends.

It's pretty amusing that despite retiring, TMFTML is still outperforming a good number of these sites. Too bad PCM can't say the same.

On the whole, it appears that the blogs I read are actually far less popular than I had initially imagined, although then again, Alexa doesn't account for how many "cool" people are checking out your site. If there were a "cool" ranking I bet all the elite NYC hipper-than-thou bloggers would top that list out.

As for the unranked, Hakushaku's hosted by Xanga, and Alexa doesn't have stats for individual Xanga pages. Same deal with Jen Chung, only she's hosted through Gothamist, so Alexa only counts the Gothamist hits.

And last but not least, we have the pages that don't even muster up enough traffic to warrant a ranking on Alexa. Of course my two best friends (Misadventures of Jer and Petroleum Jelliffe) and I bottom out the list. You'd think Alexa could throw us a bone; hell I'd be content if I were the 20 millionth most popular site. It appears Alexa stops ranking around 5,000,000, though. Oh well.

I remember at one point PCM reached as high as the 800,000s, and I suppose I've been spoiled by the quick success we had. We'll see how things shape up in another few months.