Hotsoup Vs. The Bivings Report

Posted on February 8th, 2007
By Todd Zeigler in Internet, Politics, Social Networks

I trashed the political social networking site Hotsoup pretty good back in October and immediately forgot about it and moved on with my life.

Then today I came across a post over at Fishbowl DC comparing Alexa traffic of Hotsoup to that of sites like DailyKos and Instapundit. Hotsoup did not fair well.

So I lowered the stakes and compared Hotsoup traffic to that of our modest blog, The Bivings Report, over the last three months.

That, my friends, is what you call a BAD SIGN. Sure, Alexa data is unreliable, but after all that hype you'd think they'd be doing a lot better than our stupid company blog.

Mashable summed up the problem pretty well in their launch review: "too many politicians, not enough programmers."

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kenneth

February 13th, 2007 at 12:23 am

I just remembered to come back and re-read this post- unfortunately, not for the main content but to re-read your comment “sure, Alex data is unreliable”.

It was a timely comment as it had come up in a work situation (at a *friend’s* job of course, not mine)- some non-techie board member or executive-type may or may not have asked about Alexa data, but didn’t understand why most people dismissed his questions and concerns and still thought of Alexa as authoritative.

I meant to ask you about alternatives to Alexa- are there any good ones? (I still need to check out impactwatch) I mostly use Google Trends but even that seems a off-target at times. But at least Google don’t use an IE toolbar to get their data.
Todd Zeigler

February 13th, 2007 at 10:14 am

Kenneth,

The only alternative I know about is a new one called Compete:

http://www.compete.com

The two other companies that I know of that do this kind of stuff are Hitwise and Comscore. But they are on a pay model.

http://www.comscore.com
http://www.hitwise.com

TZ