Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: "Ben Edelman" <edelman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Dave Farber'" <dfarber@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Quantifying SiteFinder Traffic
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2003 12:44:30 -0400
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal
Dave,
IP readers may be interested in a sense of just how much traffic VeriSign is
receiving from its SiteFinder service. Alexa, with its Alexa Toolbar and
associated traffic tracking services, makes it easy to find out:
<http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=verisign.com>
The highlights --
Over the past three months, taken as a whole, Verisign had traffic rank
1,559. But today its traffic rank is 19 -- meaning, at least among Alexa
users (who are generally representative of web users), the verisign.com
domain has suddenly become joined the top 20 sites, measured by page views.
VeriSign's climb is even more notable when reckoned in "reach" -- proportion
of users who visit the site at least once. Measured in this way,
verisign.com is now in position 9 -- meaning there are only eight sites on
the web that more users visit in a given day.
All that said, users don't tend to stay on verisign.com for long. Notice
page views rank of 45, far below the traffic rank, meaning that users tend
to stay on other sites for a longer duration (more page views) than on
verisign.com.
Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman