Finding out where web traffic in a city is, which are the important sites, which ones have loads of users, which ones have none is a difficult task for anyone who’s interested. Sites tend to keep their visitor numbers to themselves unless they’re seeking advertising.
So six months ago I did a post where I examined the Created in Birmingham ‘blog roll’ (the sites that Pete links to in the sidebar), and ranked them according to their Alexa ranking. Read the original post to find out what that is, and why it’s a generally unscientific way of ranking sites.
Katie Spragg commented last week that’s she’d like a six month update. Okay - here it is:
Alex rankings for a selection of ‘creative’ websites in Birmingham as at January 2008
Small numbers indicate higher traffic, larger numbers lower traffic, so this is in descending order of ‘busyness’.
As with last year’s post these numbers are for guidance only and should be taken with a pinch of salt. Alexa has some limitations in working out how a site ranks against any other, and once you get down to the 1,000,000 level it can be very changeable.
I’ve not included any sites in this list marked as “unranked” (Sorry Katie - your site didn’t rank).
Also, as Pete has said, he’s not really putting sites in his sidebar at the moment, so we’re missing a load of sites that he has covered in the last year.
What I’d like to do at some point (or maybe someone could do it for me?) would be to grab all of the distinct URLs from Created in Birmingham and put them in a spreadsheet. I’m sure I could do that with some database trickery. If I manage it, I’ll redo this list to include everyone.
Anyway - there you go. Make of it what you will.
5 Comments
“Grab all of the distinct URLs from cib”
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A//www.createdinbirmingham.com/&sourceid=mozilla2&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Google should remove the duplicates by default.
Hi Stef,
Which section of Alexia did you use? I’m curious to have a play but only seem to be able to get stats on the top 100k world sites …
Thanks
Alexa only measures people who have the Alexa Toolbar installed. I’ve never met (or heard of) any creative locally who has that toolbar installed. So are we just measuring the tastes of browser-nerds here?
@Bob - Quite possibly. Hence “Read the original post to find out what that is, and why it’s a generally unscientific way of ranking sites.” and “As with last year’s post these numbers are for guidance only and should be taken with a pinch of salt”, but it is interesting nonetheless.
@all - Does anyone know of anything more accurate or relevant than Alexa?
boo hoo. Am outcast as realise not listed on CiB!