Greg Hartnett

I have to admit it, I am a fan of Alexa. I know it has some flaws, and that it disproportionately skews results towards webmaster-related sites, and that it’s not the best way to gauge the value of a text link ad, and a host of other complaints from the peanut gallery. But I like the numbers, and the cool little graphs. Huh huh… Just another stat for me to check. Another metric to judge the current temperature of the pool.

I remember stumbling across Alexadex a while back, and while the game caught me as quaint, I didn’t bother. A few months ago, I happened across it again, and decided to give it a shot. In a nutshell, is a pretend stock market where you buy and sell shares of websites, based upon the site’s “reach per million users”. That number is a rough guesstimate (this is where the controversy over Alexa begins) of how many people per million visit the site on a daily basis. Yahoo, Alexa’s number one site forever and ever, has a reach that hovers near 300,000. Which means that for every one million people online, almost 300,000 of them visit Yahoo - impressive. On the flip side of that example, my humble blog, typically meanders in the 12-15 area (sometimes single digits). Not nearly as impressive.

You start off with $10,000 (all Monopoly money) and are free to purchase any available shares of any domain of your choice. I typically buy and sell botw.org - it’s easy for me to judge a “fair” price. Most recently, I “purchased” some shares of jimboykin.com, after I noticed a dip in his number. It has since bounced back, and I am up more than 30% on the position. Go Jim go!

I know it’s all some geeky little computer game, but since I check the numbers anyway… And while the Alexadex may share some similarities with a typical stock market, at least when these numbers get manipulated I don’t risk my mortgage payments.

If you want to sign up for a free account, feel free to sign up through this link. They credit me with $1,000 Monopoly money for each person that signs up.