Wists users continue to rise, and monthly uniques are around the 350K mark, but our Alexa is dropping and deliberately so.
The reason is that we have decided to ruthlessly cull spam users, which account for a large number on many social shopping sites and social networks.
Social network spam doesn’t tend to be that visible since the items on front pages and showcased category links (top items etc.) of many social websites are hand picked by editors or users. But do a search for high value Adsense terms within many user generated sites and you will see that the automated publishing tools have blasted them, creating useless ballast that companies are reluctant to get rid of since it generates organic search engine traffic, and makes the numbers look good.
Since the type of spam we get is SEO spam and a greater percentage of these people use Alexa toolbars , this is a risky thing to do for your ‘industry’ image, since it lowers your numbers – but we think it is the right thing to do in the long term, since it obviously makes a better product for users.
Social shopping is extremely prone to spam, for obvious commercial reasons, do a search for Viagra on Kaboodle, for example, and ponder as to how many of those users that Hearst just bought are useful. Of course I shouldn’t single out Kaboodle, they deserve congratulations on their acquisition and their technology is very solid, but they show the considerable pressure these days shared by many Internet startups to quote raw numbers and eyeballs, which sometimes obscures true, long-term value.
After the dot-com crash, the somewhat obnoxious phrase ‘eye-balls’ seemed to disappear. It’s back, but with Wists we are ultimately only interested in what people see, not how many people are looking.