Social BookMarking – Is the Honeymoon Over? Alexa says…
2.0 Traffic StrategiesUPDATE – Although this post started as a quick look at the drop in social bookmarking, it has moved into more of a discussion on the validity of Alexa, and thinking about your target market (do they bookmark? do they blog?), plus a quick intro to Seth Godin (as if, for a moment, any intro to Seth was ever required!). Skim over the stats, and head into the comments to see what I mean, and please, leave your own mark if you have questions.
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Doing a bit of research updates today to include in 2007’s Stampede Secret and I started noticing some (potentially) distressing trends to those of us who thought bookmarking was going to solve all our traffic problems…
As I surfed through over 100 social bookmarking sites and compared them to Alexa’s traffic ranking stats, I found that the majority of them had noticed a 10-40% decrease as compared to 3 months ago.
I’m not about to stake claims, make any predictions, or write a doom and gloom message for website traffic seekers hoping to use tag and bookmark practices to huge success – at least not in this post.
I do suggest however, performing some of your own research, before you jump on the social bookmarking bandwagon…
The table below has a mix of bookmarking sites, with a few of their current Alexa positions (any # with an * beside it has not decreased. In fact, those sites have seen an increase of anywhere from 2-30%).
Odd to see del.icio.us down 44 (page views and users), digg down 6, and fark down 322 to name a few. See the list and some of the numbers, I didn’t post them all publicly…
| icon | Alexa Traffic Rank |
Secret Code (coming) |
|
| 273,573 | |||
| AllMyFavorites | 357,292 | ||
| 578,821 | |||
| aWorldofHelp | |||
|
|
26,599 | ||
| BeanRocket | 1,520,213 | ||
| Bibsonomy | 5,380,647 | ||
| BlauerBote | |||
| Bloglot | 563,519* | ||
|
|
15,487 | ||
|
|
3556 |
Blog Top Sites, 7,230*
Blogmarks, 
, 6,114
BlogMemes, 
, 117,964
BlogPulse, 20,640
Blogs of the Day, 1,488,866
AdaptiveBlue, 67,576
CiteUlike, 
, 47,520
Co.mments, 
, 65,540
Complore, 
, 181,785*
Connotea, 
, 41,517
de.lirio.us, 
, 54,311*
digg, 
, 81
Diigo, 23023
Fark, 
, 1,281
Furl, 
Rojo, 
Wink, 
March 25th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Nice post, informative and accurate. If you have a few moments to fill in my details.
Sync2It.com & BookmarkSync.com’s icon is here: http://www.sync2it.com/syncit.gif
Our current traffic ranking details:
Current Ranking is 213,888 but if you view all data along with http://www.syncit.com (which is the same website), you’ll see that traffic is about steady over the past 6 years. Much of this is seasonal, though the social bookmarking and online bookmarking space is just about saturated.
Regards,
Jack
March 28th, 2007 at 12:36 am
What, no “Death of Social Bookmarking” special report?
March 28th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Ha Michelle,
I laughed outloud and my family rushed into the office to see what I was laughing about.
A heavy equipment operator husband and a teenage daughter. Needless to explain I was on my own (laughing).
Thanks for the smile. And the idea! But those ‘death of things’ drive me crazy – I’d rather read and write a ‘here’s how it really works!’ any day.
Ciao Bella! Chat with you soon…
March 29th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Don’t cry for them Argentina!
Alexa gets its stats from people who use their toolbar – predominantly internet marketers, webmasters, people who have sites.
Then they extrapolate data from the obvious tiny source they pull from to represent the whole internet community.
What Alexa says for sure above is that webmasters are no longer visiting their favorite bookmarking sites and that’s probably because of things like http://onlywire.com where you can post to the top bookmark sites without visiting them and with the click of a button and a couple of tags.
Also, webmasters, from my experience, tend to be more private about their bookmarks and don’t naturally want to share where they go and where they’ve been since most of their frequented pages are admin login pages to their sites, email, etc.
In short – website owners most likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed are not visiting the bookmarking sites other than to sign up and get an account, then use tools like OnlyWire to post their stuff remotely.
At least that’s my theory.
Jack
April 8th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
*Validity of Alexa Rank*
Jack:
I apologize for taking so long to reply! Your comments are triggering my spam plugin…
Your theory is a good one, and I’m not trying to contest it, but I’m certain there are far more people feeding Alexa than internet marketers or site owners.
And although the first paragraph of your comment states it’s used by webmasters, your fourth paragraph negates that – so I’m confused at what you’re getting at.
‘Alexa is crap’ is an old subscribed to theory that may not carry as much weight today as it did a few years back.
For instance if you’re deep into internet research, or follow the theorists and trend-setters (like Seth Godin who has envisioned just about every major play and directional shift of online business for the last 10 years or so) you’ve likely landed on the statsaholic.com site where Ron Hornbaker lays out 5 reasons Alexa traffic data has merit.
Here’s two of them quoted directly from the page:
“Newbies with the Alexa Toolbar are not the only source of data. Firefox users with Craig Raw’s cool SearchStatus extension should note that their browsing behavior is similarly being phoned-home to Alexa, and included in the statistics you see here.”
“Statistical significance is attainable with only a small subset of the population — ask a pollster or a high school math teacher.”
As for onlywire.com – great service, but in many niche markets I’m still not convinced that social bookmarking is as popular as us ‘geek’, webmaster, marketers, would like to believe…
Laura Childs
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:59 am
Another Social Bookmarking site for your list:
FuzzFizz – http://www.fuzzfizz.com
December 4th, 2007 at 3:45 am
This is really the far more exhausing list…I have seen..Almost over 90 percent are working…thanks for sharing..
January 31st, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I’m not at all surprised that social bookmarking is down and won’t be surprised to see it fall even more. The problem with social bookmarking is that it is now considered a tool for businesses to drive traffic and as businesses have their employees and contractors working night and day to bury the solo blogger or webmaster attempting to drive traffic against armies of professionals these solo webmasters simply give up and go on back to producing content and hoping for the best.
In effect, a few thousand pros are controlling what makes it to the top as they divide and destroy the solo operators so the millions of solo operators simply quit using social bookmarking.
In other words you are victims of your own successes while those of us in the know prepare for the death of Web 2.0 sharecropping and the ushering in of Web 3.0.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:11 am
Gosh Billy, it sounds like a conspiracy. ;0)
Although your points are valid, I’m not particularly pleased with being ‘lumped in’ with ‘web professionals’ (when you say “…you are the victims of your own successes…”)
I don’t actually teach overuse (abuse), nor do I promote overuse (abuse) of the services. In fact I’m not particularly wild about bookmarking in the first place!
Furthermore I teach strategy – not spamming, splogging or any other short term fix to traffic woes. This is the age of authenticity. That is what I teach.
Thank you for your comment – everyone needs a voice and I’m happy to provide the venue for your thoughts.
All my best with keeping Web 3.0 a secret from future victims.
Laura
February 1st, 2008 at 8:24 am
Laura,
My comments were in no way a personal attack but meant as a generalization.
The fact remains that in this instance industry is a victim of it’s own success.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:45 am
Billy, thanks for that. Truly.
And you are, of course, not alone in your thoughts on this.
I read earlier this month that one of the SB sites nearly crashed and immediately incorporated ‘nofollow’ tags as a result of a huge traffic spike.
This just a day after the release of Don Crowther’s (StomperNet) video. Everyone had rushed to abuse the site.
The “abuse it and lose it” results were practically immediate in that instance.
Had I bookmarked the post, I might have the link to share…
If I run across it again, I’ll post it here.