Brian -- what about google? Strikes me that that's a site used widely, including outside the US.

Very interesting data BTW!

I think another part of it is that the US has been on the "bleeding edge" of internet adoption, esp where broadband connections are involved. the rest of the world is now catching up (a few years later).

Yahoo! and Google are like solid, never-changing fixtures within Alexa's data. Yahoo's stayed at #1 and its line is totally flat.

So I didn't include those sites as they didn't show any change.

I guess the reasons people go to these websites are changing. Maybe these sites have been so popular that you no longer have to visit them(wait that makes no sense..but).

What about "traffic to blogs" in general? It would be very interesting if these stats indicated that the web is decentralising, and people are getting their news from more varied sources -- so instead of having a few high-traffic sites, you're getting lots of medium-traffic sites? That would explain why "networking" sites are bucking the trend -- they represent the growing decentralized network.

Another possibility: RSS readers? I certainly read a lot of the news I used to get from official sources from RSS feeds. My RSS feeds open in my RSS reader, and I read them there -- and I bet the Alexa toolbar only counts traffic that comes in via a *browser*, not an RSS reader.

Final possibility: Google news? Instead of getting our news from one source all the time, Google news would have the effect of spreading the traffic around much more evenly, since the "popular" news sources are not always the ones that end up on the front page of GN.

There may also be an effect here of tighter corporate control on employee's non-work-related Web traffic. If a lot of people tend to surf these sites from work and their companies are cutting/restricting that, you'd see traffic trend down.

If there was a significant non-US effect, I would expect to see the BBC's site going up, as it has huge international reach and popularity.

What affect does use of spyware blocking software have on Alexa trends?

Do any sites encourage their users to install Alexa...thus pushing them up and others down the rank? (what about sites encourage installing spyware removal software)

You also need to be careful of the graph scales. eg: BBC drop looks huge, but is actualy only 10 places. Then if you look at the 2 year graph they are back to what they were at the start of 2003 anyhow.

So between looking at a longer period and realizing the scale, I do not see any significant drop at all.

Alexa is not very well-regarded in the Web industry as being an accurate portrayal of visits -- I know that there's a wide varience between the page views they report vs. what I see in my own logs.

One reason that comes to mind is that maybe less people are using the Alexa toolbar. There's a variety of options out there, and personally I prefer the Google one myself. The trends could be caused by a shift/decrease in reports coming from the general populace. It would be interesting to find out the total sample size these graphs are based on, and how they have changed over the period of the graph.

Owen, the graphs attempt show ***RANK*** not bytes or visits or anything that would be changed by fewer uses of the toolbar. If the pattern of website uses stayed the same while fewer of those same users used the toolbar then the ranks would not change at all.

This is a non-issue. Since it's a ranking and there are new, rapidly growing sites constantly coming onto the scene, existing sites will trend downward by definition. If Orkut goes from nowhere to #200 in a few days, every site from 201 on drops 1 place. No big deal here folks.

I would think that ASIA has caught on internet revolution very well -Parts of Asia is doing even better than US -Particularly Korea in terms of online retailing - Asia has a lot of new users to internet crowd - coupled with the fact, Asia speaks more than 50 different languages and that many different primary sites in respective language. But US dominance, lead in usage of internet for business needs is unlikely to be challenged for several years to come.

Um, warm weather, anyone? It's called spring, look into it. duh?

Bog, look at the graphs again. Most of the downward trends occurred in the heart of winter -- Jan/Feb 2004 -- or even earlier.

Unless you're writing from Down Under, what's spring got to do with it? Duh?

Anyone know of another site that offers the same service. My sites show up with zero info on this site.

I just wanted to say hi to the owner of a great site. I found a lot of interesting
stuff here. Thanks..

Alexa released a new kind of traffic graph that shows reach, rather than rank. Reach is a better indicator of actual visitors than rank ever was and it would be interesting to re-do this experiment using the new graphs. btw, number of Alexa Toolbar users during the experiment above is between 1 and 2 million and growing.