

Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth - dmor
http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/traction-tracker-84-y-combinator-companies-with-significant-traffic-growth/

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bravura
This work lacks grounding because the measure of interest, _Alexa rank_ , is
not situated in measures that are familiar.

The author, dmor, is not familiar with the semantics of the Alexa rank. Nor
are most readers. We know loosely that low rank is good. But what does going
from rank 1000 to 100 really mean? How hard is that? Is it a traffic increase
of 10x? 100x? What exponential base does it follow?

So this chart shows the YC companies that have the largest Alexa rank delta.
Frankly, the rankings look plain wrong to me, based upon what I know of these
companies.

Other commentators have suggested that, given the power law distribution, we
actually care about the delta log-rank. A priori, I would agree. But then we
get a new ranked list, and we still don't know if we're actually learning
something or our log-metric is messed up. That's actually quite pernicious, if
the results look vaguely correct at a coarse level, so we trust the results at
a fine-grained level, and don't realize that the methodology and results are
wrong.

We're all just blowing hot air because we don't really know what Alexa ranks
mean. Only SEOs who work with Alexa ranks frequently, understand the
undocumented warts, and have a gut sense of what they mean, can interpret
this.

But right now, we really have no point of reference and the table leaves us
without having gained any insight.

Perhaps I'm actually happy that the results are so clearly wrong and not
helpful. At least that way, no one will trust them. It would be much more
insidious if the results were commonly thought to be instructive, but in fact
were misleading.

~~~
beambot
When you don't have deep (insider) access to key metrics, you have to rely on
other indicators of success. __Alexa provides one piece of data that is semi-
meaningful: if nothing else, I'd wager it's roughly correlated (on average)
with market cap and/or exit price. (dmor: this would be a cool graph!)

 __Plus, these companies are in drastically different markets. Their key
metrics are probably quite different, or (at the very least) not directly
comparable to growth in value / profitability.

~~~
bravura
_Alexa provides one piece of data that is semi-meaningful:_

That's my point. This measure is semi-meaningful.

How meaningful is it? Very? Somewhat? Well, we don't know.

The way you determine how meaningful it is, is by connecting the dots with
another measure. For example, we have this measure that is cheap to acquire
but perhaps inaccurate (Alexa). Can we connect it with another measure that is
harder to acquire but more accurate (e.g. exit value)?

 _if nothing else, I'd wager it's roughly correlated (on average) with market
cap and/or exit price. (dmor: this would be a cool graph!)_

I would wager that too. But we don't know until you run the numbers.

Grounding your measures is what separates cool hacks from data you can
actually draw meaningful inferences from. I think dmor is trying to do
something real here, which is why I think it useful to help her actually push
the ball forward and really make something much more valuable.

I agree that exit value / market cap is a good auxiliary measure. I think I
also suggested this in another comment.

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pacaro
Comparing absolute change in Alexa rank seems fundamentally broken to me. It
weights massively to early companies.

Snipshot's rank rose by nearly 80,000 - that's undeniably good, but 37 of the
companies on the list had a previous rank of less than 80,000...

I would suggest comparing the delta of the log of rank, this gives a more
interesting (to me) metric...

For example this bumps Newsblur up from a "meh" 23 to 1! And AnyPerk from an
exciting 6 down to a not so cool (unless you like catches) 22 (not picking on
AnyPerk, it's just the most demoted of the original top 10)

Under this change of methodology the biggest winner is WorkFlowy from 61->24,
biggest loser's are Circle (39-67); FundersClub (40-68); and Cloudant (44-72)

~~~
beambot
Presumably, the sites on Alexa follow a power law (based on traffic), so
deltas on log-rank would indeed make a lot of sense. Of course... the data
itself is quite interesting. Mad props to Danielle for compiling all of it --
this makes running our own quick calcs that much easier.

~~~
dmor
I considered it but was on the fence so I wasn't going to use log this first
time, but it sounds like that really might be the best approach. Give me a
minute and I'll make a spreadsheet you guys can check out to see if it makes
more sense.

UPDATE: Here you go!
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdGM...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdGMxbi1qYkdCcXVLY0lmVnk4R1FVV0E&output=html)

~~~
conesus
NewsBlur's #1 on the spreadsheet, which is crazy talk to me. I've been too
busy scaling to even look at my analytics.

~~~
dmor
Well this is the kind of graph I dream about :)
<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/newsblur.com#>

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SwellJoe
This is cool and all, but you probably want to compare April of this year to
April of last year (and previous years). My company (Virtualmin, 76 on the
list) has pretty big fluctuations throughout the year, with early months
(specifically January) being the best, and December being the worst. So, if
you were to compare December to January for us, you'd see a huge spike
upward...but if you compared January to February, you'd see a small drop
downward (and that trend might even continue throughout the year...though it
seems to not be happening that way between March and April).

I'm just saying this is a pretty limited view of these sites, and it'd be
difficult to draw useful conclusions from it. Our traffic probably isn't
growing faster than more recent YC companies, even if we show up above them on
the list. We're a pretty stable entity at this point. Not to say I didn't get
a kick out of seeing our numbers getting better at a pretty rapid clip, even
knowing more detail about what our traffic actually looks like.

~~~
dmor
I absolutely agree with you regarding seasonality, I simply don't have a
snapshot from a year ago. But a year from now I will be able to do this now
that I am collecting the data each month.

~~~
viame
Thanks for putting this together. Also if you can't get your hands on the data
from 2012 maybe taking the launch date vs their current Alexa position and
averaging this out to see their Alexa growth over their lifespan. That would
be really nice to see.

Thanks again.

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SeoxyS
I don't think growth in Alexa rank is a good metric, because it does not
measure growth as typically defined (in %age increase in raw traffic).
Unfortunately that makes the entire table mostly meaningless.

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orangethirty
I don't see how traction relates to traffic. Traction rates to financials.
Traffic relates to momentum, which is more of a measure of visitors, and not
of growth. Not a bad data set per we, either. I'd love to see this type of
approach done with each company's growth, but I am sure most will shy away,
including the YC founders.

~~~
tomasien
Traction relates to financials - citation needed

~~~
il
Isn't that just a truism? Revenue growth=traction by definition.

~~~
tomasien
No, that is not a truism. It is a falsism if it is any kind of ism.

Instagram has yet to make a single dollar, for an extreme example, and yet
nobody would argue it has gained insane amounts of traction since in the
mobile photo sharing space since launch. I would use Facebook as an example,
but they had small revenue generating efforts early on so it doesn't make as
clean of an example.

~~~
il
Let me rephrase then: Not all traction is revenue growth, but all revenue
growth is traction(again, by definition).

~~~
dmor
Not necessarily, in fact that was was of the fallacies of the dot com bubble.
Revenue is traction if it is gained at a reasonable cost. There are definitely
unit economics that look like growth but come at an unsustainable cost.

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il
I think traffic for lists like these is something of a red herring. Small
fluctuations for low-traffic sites are almost entirely a result of randomness
or sampling error.

A better metric would be to divide the companies by traffic into nontrivial
traffic(Alexa Rank<10,000) and trivial traffic for the rest. It would require
some more research, but it would also be very helpful to separate consumer vs
B2B companies and only compare consumer companies on traffic. Many of the
companies on that list(including my company MixRank) appear to be doing quite
poorly in terms of traffic until one realizes that each visitor to a B2B
product is worth orders of magnitude more than a visitor to a consumer
product.

~~~
dmor
Splitting out consumer vs. B2B companies is definitely on my list in the near
future

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dhawalhs
Google Trends can be used to get some sense of traction. eg.
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Newsblur%2C%20coinbas...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Newsblur%2C%20coinbase%2C%20PagerDuty%2C%20carwoo%2C%20Tutorspree&cmpt=q)

The problem is that the results are relative. One way would be to pick a
keyword with a relatively high search volume which could be used as baseline.
Another issue that I can think of is that companies named after common english
words i.e. Pebble will have their results artificially inflated. This process
might be hard or tricky to automate.

Growth in followers/likes/tweets/+1 counts could be used as a measure of
traction.

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mrwhy2k
I like most of your lists and creativity, but this one isn't very helpful and
it feels like you're reaching. After a site cracks the Alexa top 10,000, it
becomes a lot harder to move up and should be worth a lot more on rankings.

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tomasien
Since everyone else seems to be finding a reason to be critical, I'll just
say: I found this really interesting, and I'm glad you presented the data this
way so that I could make my own analysis. It wasn't to say that #1 on the list
had made the most progress (although who that was was surprising) but rather
than these are the companies from YC that are growing in terms of traffic.
Make of it what you will.

Quite interesting that Dropbox jumped an entire spot in a month for a non-
content based site.

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pg_bot
Can you sort by the delta in monthly pageviews? Absolute change in rank offers
little meaningful information. (I would assume is much easier to go from
10,000 to 5,000 than 200 to 100.)

~~~
wilfra
And going from 300,000+ to 100,000 is orders of magnitude easier than going
from 10,000 to 5,000.

#1 on this list went from 2xx,xxx to 2xx,xxx - that could seriously be just
noise in the Alexa ranking methodology. That sites traffic could have even
gone down slightly and still produced that result.

------
est
The spreadsheet didn't include 9gag?

<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/9gag.com>

<http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/yc-demo-day-s12/>

~~~
dmor
9gag's global traffic rank dropped from #328 to #329 in the sample period. The
list does not include companies whose traffic went down, even if they are in
the top 250,000 of all sites globally. I included an explanation of this in
the post.

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timedoctor
Alexa rank is not accurate when it's higher than 20,000. If higher than
100,000 it is not accurate at all and can be gamed easily. Just get a few
friends with the alexa toolbar to visit your site and your alexa rank will
magically get a whole lot lower.

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raldi
It would be nice to see a second tab on that spreadsheet, without any
filtering. In particular, I'm curious to see where reddit would rank on that
list. It seems arbitrary and incorrect to consider them less of a startup
than, say, DropBox.

~~~
dmor
I generally don't include companies that have exited. You can view the YC
index here and download the data. The April version will be out soon.
[http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/the-y-combinator-
inde...](http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/the-y-combinator-index/)

~~~
joshu
Reddit unexited. They're an independent company now.

~~~
dmor
Yeah, they're sort of weird edge case but I can see a case for wanting to
benchmark against them, let me think about it a bit.

------
earbitscom
I feel pretty good about this given that our biggest source of traffic is the
Google Chrome Web Store and use of our Chrome application doesn't show up in
Alexa rankings. We're fairing way, way better than Alexa would have you
believe.

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codex
These ranks are so high that any metric based on them must surely have a lot
of noise. I guess that doesn't prevent dmor's voting ring from surfacing this
post, though.

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wilfra
These are great and I look forward to you iterating on this - but I fear your
over-reliance on Alexa is producing semi-worthless results. I can go into all
of the reasons why Alexa data is unreliable but I assume you already know (the
big one is selection bias based on who has the toolbar installed).

If you combine Alexa data w/ data from Quantcast, Statcounter and others, it
would probably be valuable. But even Alexa themselves would tell you their
dataset has massive holes in it when trying to use it as the foundation for
this kind of thing.

~~~
dmor
I hear you, and for the startup index we are now collecting 9 data points and
v1 of the new one is a labor of love that I will hopefully have out in the
next week or so. Iterating like a mofo :)

~~~
gav
It's a little old, but here's some notes from Reddit and their traffic vs.
numbers from Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa:
[http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-
our-...](http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-
traffic.html)

From my personal experience, the numbers from Alexa are complete gibberish.

